Listening
Chekhov was the first writer whose style I tried to emulate, but the attempt felt about as clunky as trying to write in his native Russian. Chekhov could turn a walk home from church into a compelling plot point whereas I would make it… a walk home from church, along with some descriptors about the weather.
Chekhov has this mysterious way of posing life’s most meaningful questions through the eyes of seemingly mundane characters - the schoolteacher in a remote Siberian town, an elderly housewife with no children, the old man with nothing to his name but two chickens.
It didn’t take me too long to figure out that I would never be able to write like Chekhov. I don’t mean that in a pessimistic way though - I knew that somewhere out there, there was some writing lane out there for me to do well in. Whether it took months or years, I would find it somehow.
Hopefully.
The more I wrote, the more I realized that writing is mostly about listening.
I would start a story by describing an elderly man that just won the lottery after spending most of his life working at the same Korean grocery store. Naturally, questions would come up about this character.
What would he do with the money? And what if, after winning, he picks up his phone in excitement, only to realize that there wasn’t anyone for him to share the news with?
The answers to all these questions would only come from listening to the character. What kept him at the same job all these years? Were his hours so crazy that he never had the time to make friends? Or, was it just hard to make friends in a Korean neighborhood as a Turkish guy who spoke limited English?
If I listened closely enough, the answers to these questions and the ending to this story would come naturally - predestined even.
I would have gotten fired from my first job if I hadn’t quit ten months in.
In 2016, coding and data science was all the rage. More math classes meant a higher salary when you graduated - it really was that simple. Forget the fact that I was passionate about literature, history, economics, and gambling. The way to maximize my future welfare was to maximize my career earnings, which meant a career in data science.
For a variety of reasons - youth, lack of work-life balance, not understanding the amount of anxiety that comes with two cups of Philz coffee - I was miserable at my first job. It took me a while to realize this though. After a break-up and a family vacation where I couldn’t sleep because of work stress, I finally began to listen to myself. I acknowledged the lump in my chest on Sunday evenings before going to bed. I allowed myself to feel the weariness in my body that came with a 2.5 hour round trip commute and 70-hour work weeks.
When I got back from that family vacation, it became very clear to me that I didn’t just need to quit my job. I needed a longer break. There wasn’t a point to leaving my job, jumping back into the job market, only to end up in the same position again.
I needed to take the time to listen - both to myself and the world around me.
People generally have pretty refined tastes when it comes to movies and literature. If we’re introduced to a young man who’s unemployed and has lived with his parents for the past eight years, we know that this person’s life is stuck in more ways than one. Similarly, if we’re reading about a widowed man with no kids, we expect that the man is going to be lonely.
With storytelling, our expectations are that the plot moves forward in some way. The aimless young man attends his best friend’s wedding and falls for the maid of honor who turns out to be a career-driven woman. The widower attends the funeral of a childhood friend, expecting to see other longtime friends, only to realize that he’s the last one remaining in his extended friend group.
If one listens closely to these stories, they’re demanding some sort of action from our protagonists. Yet, in real life, we’re generally pretty bad at listening to the stories of our own lives.
I stuck it out in my first job way too long. Millions of people stay in unhappy marriages, jobs, or living situations for years if not decades. When it comes to our own lives, we usually don’t have the same sense of impatience that we have for fictional characters.
Imagine if the aimless young man didn’t speak to the maid of honor at all during his best friend’s wedding and simply returned to his parents’ home to continue living his old life. Depending on the execution, the story might be well-written, but we’d feel a deep sense of frustration with the protagonist here. Go out and get on with your life, damn it!
But when it comes to our lives, we’re ok with living in the exposition and shying away from the rising action. There’s no need to rush things.
Time, after all, is free.