What reading slowly taught me about writing

A long time ago, there lived a giant,

a selfish giant, whose stunning garden
was the most beautiful in all the land.

One evening, this giant came home
and found all these children

playing in his garden,
and he became enraged.

"My own garden is my own garden,"

the giant said,

and he built this high wall around it.

The author Oscar Wilde wrote this story
of this selfish giant in 1888.

Almost a hundred years later, that giant
moved into my Brooklyn childhood

and never left.

I was raised in a religious family,

and I grew up reading
both the Bible and the Quran.

The hours of reading,
both religious and recreational,

far outnumbered the hours
of television-watching.

Now, on any given day,
you could find my siblings and I

curled up in some part
of our apartment reading,

sometimes unhappily,

because on summer days in New York City,
the fire hydrant blasted,

and to our immense jealousy,
we could hear our friends down there

playing in the gushing water,

their absolute joy making its way up
through our open windows.

But I learned that the deeper
I went into my books,

the more time I took with each sentence,

the less I heard the noise
of the outside world,

and so, unlike my siblings,
who were racing through books,

I read slowly,

very, very slowly.

I was that child with her finger
running beneath the words

until I was untaught to do this,
told big kids don't use their fingers.

In third grade, we were made to sit
with our hands folded on our desk,

unclasping them only to turn the pages,
then returning them to that position.

Our teacher wasn't being cruel.

It was the 1970s, and her goal
was to get us reading

not just on grade level but far above it.

And we were always
being pushed to read faster.

But in the quiet of my apartment
outside of my teacher's gaze,

I let my finger run beneath those words,

and that selfish giant
again told me his story,

how he had felt betrayed by the kids
sneaking into his garden,

how he had built this high wall,

and it did keep the children out,

but the grey winter fell over his garden

and just stayed and stayed.

With each rereading,
I learned something new

about the hard stones of the roads
that the kids were forced to play on

when they got expelled from the garden,

about the gentleness of a small boy
that appeared on day,

and even about the giant himself.

Maybe his words weren't rageful after all.

Maybe they were plea for empathy,

for understanding.

My own garden is my own garden.

Years later, I would learn
of a writer named John Gardner

who referred to this as the fictive dream,

or the dream of fiction,

and I would realize that this
was where I was inside that book,

spending time with the characters
and the world that the author had created

and invited me into.

As a child, I knew that stories
were meant to be savored,

that stories wanted to be slow,

and that some author had spent months,

maybe years writing them,

and my job as the reader,
especially as the reader

who wanted to one day become a writer,

was to respect that narrative.

Long before there was cable
or the internet

or even the telephone,

there were people sharing ideas
and information and memory through story.

It's one of our earliest forms
of connective technology.

It was the story of something
better down the Nile

that sent the Egyptians moving along it,

the story of a better way
to preserve the dead

that brought King Tut's remains
into the 21st century.

And more than two million years ago,

when the first humans
began making tools from stone,

someone must have said, what if?

And someone else remembered the story.

And whether they told it through words
or gestures or drawings,

it was passed down, remembered:

hit a hammer and hear its story.

The world is getting noisier.

We've gone from boomboxes

to Walkmen to portable to CD players

to iPods

to any song we want whenever we want it.

We've gone from the four
television channels of my childhood

to the seeming infinity
of cable and streaming.

As technology moves us faster and faster
through time and space,

it seems to feel like story
is getting pushed out of the way,

I mean literally pushed out
of the narrative.