Apples, Bananas -- The Writer's Need for Experience© by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
And now, a question. I throw you an object---roundish, reddish,
with a short stem, a firm white flesh, seeds in the center, and
you say "fruit" if you're being generic, or "apple" if you're being
specific. I toss you another piece of fruit, this one yellow, maybe
with a few brown spots, with a pulpy off-white flesh beneath a thick
skin, and you say "banana." Here's the question.
What did you say wrong?
This is a discussion about life, and how the writer must see the
world, and how the world conspires to blind the writer. And the
first thing you must realize in this discussion is that the fruit
I'm talking about is not a metaphor for anything. When I say apples
and bananas, I am talking about ... apples and bananas. The second
thing you must bear in mind is that this matters, no matter how
trivial it may seem.
Back to apples. You go into the grocery store most anywhere in
the United States, most any time of the year. You can find apples.
Red Delicious, Yellow Delicious, Granny Smith. Maybe Macintosh.
They'll be in the produce section, well-waxed, beautiful to behold,
stacked neatly in those geometric patterns grocers love. You take
them home, you eat them, your brain says you ate an apple. But you
didn't. You ate something with about as much taste as the wax fruit
my grandmother used to keep on her table, and whatever that insipid
thing was, it wasn't an apple.
Unless you live in the North and have access to the roadside produce
stands or to growers' orchards, and you go out driving on one of
those breathtaking autumn days when the sky has turned an impossible
blue and the leaves on the sugar maples are crimson and maroon and
lemon yellow, and unless you have purchased a small paper bag full
of apples with names you have never heard before, you have never
tasted an apple. You have tasted a lie, and been told that it was
an apple.
There are hundreds of varieties of apples, and there are apples
that grow on abandoned farms in out-of-the-way back roads that are
almost too ugly to look at and that have no names at all. When you
bite into these apples, they are so sweet and tart and juicy and
crisp that they bite you back, and your eyes water and their sharp,
tangy scent burrows a hole into your brain and fixes there forever
the taste of the apple and the rough texture of its imperfect skin
and the color of the sky on the day you tasted it and the sound
of water from the spring just above the roadside stand and the scent
of growing grass and mouldering leaves and cold air touched with
both the heartbreaking memory of summer gone and the promise of
the coming of winter, and soaked overall in the unbearable beauty
of the moment that vanishes before you can blink, but that will
be with you always.
Real apples don't make it into the grocery stores. Only the apple-shaped
frauds that are so durable that they can be waxed and preserved
and fixed like bugs in formaldehyde and kept almost forever touch
the lips of most people. Most people have never tasted an apple.
Have you?
Well, then, on to bananas. Bananas. What can anyone say about
bananas? They aren't like apples. You can concede that the best
apples don't travel well, that probably by the time they've sat
in storage forever the market apples don't have much flavor ...
but a banana is a banana is a banana, right? You have Chiquita,
you have Dole, and maybe one or two other kinds, and every banana
you ever tasted has been pretty much like every other banana you
ever tasted, and if there were ever a mediocre fruit, that fruit
would be the banana. Bland, inoffensive, polite. Nice. A cornflakes-and-lunchboxes
fruit.
And every banana you have ever tasted---if you get all your bananas
from the grocery store---has been as much a lie as those pathetic
excuses for apples you know so well. There are as many kinds of
real bananas as there are real apples. Tiny bananas the size of
your fingers that are so sweet and rich they make an ambrosial desert
all by themselves, bananas long as your forearm that are bitter
unless fried in strips and eaten hot and crunchy, bananas with reddish
skins, bananas with firm flesh, bananas with bite. Coming soon to
a grocery store near you?
Not likely. You can buy all these wonderful bananas in the open-air
markets in Central America by bargaining with the old, dark-eyed
woman who sits on the cobblestones next to the white-plastered,
bullet-riddled ruins of the old Catholic church. They arrived in
town that morning on the back of her burro, and next Saturday she
will bring more. You will not see these bananas in Nebraska or Arkansas
or New York because the good bananas, ripened by the sun and eaten
immediately, have no way to get from that far-away place to your
kitchen.
Unless the fruits you have come to think of as bananas are cut
from the banana trees when they are hard and green and miles from
ripe, they will rot in transit. And if they are cut from
the tree while green, they will never have the flavor they would
have had. And the exotic bananas look funny to the eyes of consumers,
and wouldn't sell in sufficient numbers anyway. So if you get your
bananas from a grocery store, you will never taste a real banana.
Apples ... bananas ...
What else in your life has been lying to you? What other banal,
insipid excuses have been masquerading as the real things, convincing
you that you have lived and experienced the world when in fact you
have been led around in blinders? If you are going where everyone
else goes, and if you are doing what everyone else does, just about
everything in your life has been a thin, weak broth, colored to
look pretty and palatable, mass-produced to sell to a least-common-denominator
clientele who are led into buying what isn't very good because they
have been ignorant all their lives that better is out there.
Unless you have been to Alaska in the middle of the salmon run,
when the black flies are biting like hell and the mosquitoes make
blankets on every inch of exposed skin, and unless you have cut
an inch-thick steak from a king salmon pulled fresh from the river
and gutted right there, and unless you have wrapped that salmon
steak in tin-foil filled with butter and perhaps pepper, and buried
it in coals to cook, you have never tasted real salmon.
Have you ever walked across the tundra, feeling it give beneath
your feet as if you were walking across a mattress that stretched
as far as the eye could see---a mattress with shot springs and a
coating of blueberries the size of your thumb and salmonberries
and stands of fuscia fireweed that grow eye-high? Have you ever
ridden your bicycle along eastern Ohio's hilly back roads on a June
day when the maples and the oaks shade the road and make the world
look like a green cathedral, and the heat suppresses the sounds
of everything but the drone of insects and the crunch of your tires
on the gravel---when you stop and pick wild blackberries from the
side of the road and get thorns in your thumb? Have you ever pulled
a live crayfish from under a slick, moss-coated rock in the chilly,
clear stream where you are standing with your feet bare while your
toes squoodge in the slick, sensuous mud---and the crayfish, cool
and coarse-carapaced, waves claws and antennae at you and you admire
the armor that covers his tail and the way his beady eyes watch
you before you drop him in the water and he darts away backward?
What parts of your life are not homogenized, pasteurized, FDA-approved,
plastic-wrapped, unscented, tasteless, pablum? What have you seen
that has not been filtered through the lying eye of television,
or the movies---what have you heard that has not been influenced
by radio, what have you read that is untouched and unsullied by
corporations, the press, advertisers? What do you participate in
that has no sponsor, no advertising, no board or council to promote
it? What in your life is real?
And what does this have to do with writing?
Just this. If you have never tasted a real apple, you will never
write about an apple that is real. If you have never felt an icy
November rain soak through your clothes and drizzle down your spine
and leave your nose cold and dripping and your eyes half-blind and
blinking like defective windshield wipers, your characters will
only be able to show readers the world from the inside of a heated
automobile, or through the plate-glass window of a suburban house.
If you have never lived, how are you going to write characters that
live?
Real is free---or at least damned cheap. You want real? Turn off
the television, go outside, get away from people. Let your cheeks
get chapped by the cold, burned by the sun. Take a chance on that
ugly fruit at the produce stand. Buy cloudy apple cider from your
next-door neighbor who presses his own from the trees he grows in
his back yard. Walk or ride a bike. Smell the air around you---even
if it stinks of sweat and exhaust from cars and trash from the dumpster
at the corner, it's better for your writing than the recycled air-conditioned
air that you've been hiding in.
At least once, don't take anything when you get a headache. Let
yourself hurt, and accept the hurt, and pay attention to it. At
least once, cry when you're sad instead of pretending everything
is fine.
At least once, give yourself something real to hold on to, because
if all you know is sanitary plastic, all you will ever write is
sanitary plastic.
Where have you found unexpected experience?
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