The Creature and His Tale

It’s so much fun to see this creation of mine take shape and form, even sometimes taking on a life of its own. That’s the most fun – when I’m writing along to a plan, and then suddenly I feel my fingers typing or writing more furiously as though off the radar screen or out past sight of land. No one’s watching, my fingers seem to say. That’s when a bit of life quickens in me and I sense that creation is a spark, not a plan.

A book is really just a protracted speech. We’ve got a tale to tell – and it’s lengthy – and we write it because we’re afraid no listener will sit long enough to hear it without boredom or disapproval. By writing, we get to say all that we want to say, but you, the listener, don’t have to be burdened by the story. And you won’t interrupt us.

I think that’s why I’ve always preferred writing to the medium of talking. I grew up in a family in which no one listened to the half-sentence I might have squeaked out before I was cut off or plowed over with others’ more important speech. That’s how and why I started writing as soon as I could hold the pencil and sound out the words, match letters to those sounds . . . as a way to finish a sentence.

Of course it’s ideal to be heard as well – the flip side of talking. If communication were a coin, then I’d say talking is the heads side. The substance and feeling of what you say is the alloy of the coin. Being heard, the tails side, is what gives the coin its recognized value, its rate of exchange – but it’s not necessary if you’re only taking a snapshot of a coin or tossing it around in your pocket forever.

As a very young child, I would get ready for sleep at night by placing the heads of my 7 or 8 stuffed animals in a crown-like or starburst-like position around my own head so that each one of their heads was touching mine. In that way, as I imagined and created my story for the night (often continued from the previous night – a saga not to be missed), so could each of those animals “hear” the story my brain was relating. It was a way of having listeners before the time of my own literacy.

That’s how important it is for humans to be heard – any way they can. A child will often act up, not because they are bad creatures, but because even bad attention is better than none at all. I also consider that when people become hermits, or get banished to distant islands, or get held in confinement, they often write – or go crazy!

I think of when Dr. Frankenstein first comes face to face with the monster he created after it ran away from him two years previously. The good doctor is repulsed by that monster, hates it, and rejects it. The monster implores him over three paragraphs in the text merely to listen to him before doing away with him. This highly distilled version of the three-paragraph monster’s speech is from chapter 2 of part 2:

“Listen to my tale . . . But hear me . . . Listen to me, Frankenstein . . . Yet I ask you not spare me: listen to me . . . Still thou canst listen to me, and grant me thy compassion . . . Hear my tale; it is long and strange . . . you will have heard my story, and can decide.”

Finally, Dr. Frankenstein, after much protestation, agrees to listen to his creation. “I determined at least to listen to his tale . . . For the first time, also, I felt what duties of a creator towards his creature were . . . the fiend with an air of exultation, I with a heavy heart and depressed spirits . . . But I consented to listen . . . he thus began his tale.”