One of the challenges I faced as a starting writer was characterization. I'd write a short story, submit it to a writing workshop, and then listen to the panelists' (those who have positions in the literary world) comments on how to make my work a lot better. I found their comments and advices very helpful since I am writing for an audience, and their comments and critiques could help my audience grasp my work better. And, most of the critiques were on my characters. They said that my characters were too flat, and the reader couldn't differentiate one from the other. Their speech and actions were like it belonged to one person. When I heard those comments, all that I could phrase inside my head was the fact that those characters I used speak and act the same because I never really conjured them out of nowhere—they were living within me like maggots slowly eating me down, so at some point they were me.
"Well, that’s one problem you have to get over with," a friend of mine told me. She too was just a starting writer, and we attended the same writing workshops available here in our province, Cavite. Most of the critiques on her works centered on the structure of the plots she constructed.
"What do you do to make your characters 3D?" I asked her.
"In my opinion, you have to see them, you know what I mean? You have to know every inch of their body, and every bloody and murky page in their history," was her polite reply.
"If that's the case, I have a big problem. When I write, I can't help putting fragments of myself on my characters. And again these fragments are fragments I also use on other characters."
"I think you should fight that if you want to get better at characterization. There should always be some sort of line, you know? A line that divides you and the character. Of course, it's not wrong to put a part of yourself to that other, but not fragments. Let it become, um, dust for example."
"Dust are still fragments," I remarked.
"Whatever. Anyway, it's your job as the writer, you know," she said, putting an end to our conversation about my problem. And in fact, she was right. She took a cigarette from the pocket of her jeans and lit it with a red lighter. "And finally, after reviewing my story, I found out the problem with my plot."
"Which was?"
She blew smoke through her nose. "Reality check."
"You speak like you've been out of reality for a long time," I said.
"Oh, you know the world we writers build around ourselves. When we write, we leap out of reality for a while."
I just nodded in some sort of agreement and asked her for a cigarette.
An idea came to me one morning. One typical Monday in fact.
I woke up without a thought in mind. As part of my morning routine, I headed toward the kitchen, boiled water for coffee, and while waiting for it to be done, I went to the sink and splashed cool faucet water on my face. When the water was boiling, I made a cup of coffee, and then sat on a plastic monobloc chair on my yard, and just sat there admiring the starting day. I lit a cigarette and snuffed the fumes the cigarette and the coffee made. A typical Monday. I used to work as a sales representative in a company located in Makati, and it went fine for a while until I got fed up by some capitalist bullshit my boss was aiming for and I resigned. I’ve been out of work for quite some time, and it just came to my mind to pursue a career in writing. I’ve been writing since my high school days, and now was the moment I felt the time was ripe for me to be serious about it. So I attended workshops, and that was why today was a typical Monday for me. Come to think of it, instead of me scanning the classified ads on the morning paper, I'm at the yard, giving my body its early doses of caffeine and nicotine. I stared at my yard for a moment, thinking about nothing particular, recalling things here and there.
And then all of a sudden, like blowing wind, I heard a familiar song playing from a neighbor's stereo.
I smiled at myself for a while, listening to the song. It was "Something" by The Beatles. I could guess that my neighbor who was playing that on his stereo was old and was feeling kind of nostalgic. I love listening to old songs. They give me this melancholic and meditative feeling. Today, however, I felt quite...nostalgic.
I wasn't a Beatles fan myself. Of course, because I was born long after their time. I was born in the era when their music was almost forgotten. I know a few of their songs, but I was more on the contemporary side. In fact, I only learned of their song "Something" back in college, when it was mentioned on a book I was reading back then. No wonder I felt nostalgic upon hearing that song again, especially now when my college days were way past me.
But of course, when I hear the song "Something" by The Beatles, I didn't remember my college days per se. The first thing that came to my mind was the library in that university I attended. I couldn't place why that library comes to mind. It has no relation to the song whatsoever. However, as the realm of memory opens wider, it gives out more detail, more things, and as fast as possible—until finally, it passes by. So, I immediately opened my laptop and decided to write everything as a short story.
As the song "Something" by The Beatles plays, I remember the library. They have no connection to each other. But whenever that particular library comes to mind, I remember a girl. Now there's a clear connection there. That girl's always at the library.
I was through with two pages when the problem I had from the start began grinning at me, like the memory of the library after hearing The Beatles song, greeting me with a blinking cursor.
"When I hear the song 'Something' by The Beatles, it reminds me of this library in the university when I was in college, and when I remember the library, I remember this girl I used to see there, sitting alone, reading a book." That was supposed to be where the whole story was supposed to revolve. Some other stuff outlined in my head were the following:
POINT OF VIEW: First person.
CHARACTERS: A Narrator, who was a starting writer and The Girl in the Library, whom the Narrator recalls in memory after hearing the song "Something" by The Beatles.
It sounded like a good plan to me at first, but then I remembered that the girl in the library, the one in my memory, where I based one of my characters in that outline I have above, was hard to flesh out because I know nothing about her. I hardly knew her. Not once did I try to approach her.
Every time I enter the library, I always see this girl, and she was always sitting all alone with a book in her hands, on the last row of tables on the far right corner of the library. She had a pointed nose, light brown skin, and wore thick eyeglasses. From time to time, I would notice that the only movements she made were to turn a page, to adjust her eyeglasses or to return a book she was reading to the shelf, and then get her things and leave. She hardly talked to anyone, and hardly anyone talked to her.
And in the pages I've finished so far, I saw that my problems with characterization were sticking out.
Who is this girl at the library? Yes, I know how she looks like. I have observed her. But who's she, exactly? I don't know where she lives; I don't know what her family's like; I have no idea why she sits alone, reading books—what's she reading for anyway? Research? Exam? Why didn't I take any step to get to know her since I am so curious, let alone full of admiration, to her?
I made a few more pages, trying to answer those questions, trying to come up with something that could connect everything. Something that would make my character, the girl in the library, have flesh. Something that would help my reader grasp the character. But all I did was assume everything. Like the real girl in the library, the character of the girl in the library I made was, if anything, nothing.
For three straight days, the idea remained in my head, but I haven't finished a single draft.
It was morning on my fourth day of trying to write a story when the girl in the library came to my house.
She gave a gentle knock on the door and when I opened it, she was there: pointed nose, eyes shielded with a pair of eyeglasses, a fair complexion, neck-length jet-black hair, and she was wearing the uniform we had back in college: a white blouse with long sleeves that hid her wrists and a skirt whose ends fell down to her knees.
"Hi," she greeted. Her voice was mild like a melody on a typical Monday morning.
"What are you doing here?" I replied.
"I'm going to help you out," she answered quickly.
I was trying to check if my brain was still inside my skull so I didn't reply.
"You won't even let me in?" she sneered.
I stepped away from the door way. The girl stepped in, looking around. "What a nice place you have here," she said. She sat on the living room couch, stretching her legs. I simply stood near the doorway, looking at her.
"Coffee?" I managed to offer.
"No, thanks. I'd rather have a book," she said, motioning on a dusty bookshelf beside the metal stand where the TV was resting on.
"Oh yeah, right," I said. I went to the bookshelf and scanned a few titles. My bookshelf doesn't have much to offer. It housed a few novels and some reference books. "What do you like?"
She gave it a thought for a while. "Hmm...got anything from Anais Nin?"
I swallowed. "Erotica?"
"Anything wrong about it?"
"Nothing," I said, my back turned to her. I gently shook my head. "I don't have anything from her."
"Too bad," she replied. "I love reading erotica. It always gives me this feeling of warmth. Like I'm safe and sound."
I just chuckled.
"What books have you got there?" she added. She stood and checked the shelves herself. After scanning the books there, I saw in her eyes the glint of disappointment.
"Only these?" she exclaimed. "You're a writer for God's sake! You have to read a lot!"
She sat back on the couch and asked me to make her a cup of coffee. "No sugar and no cream, ha?"
"Why?" I asked as I was filling the kettle with water from the faucet.
"It makes me feel safe and sound," she answered.
We sat at the couch, drinking coffee. She looked back at me as I stared at her. I couldn't believe she was beside me at this moment, all flesh.
"So, you say you're here to help me out," I managed to say.
"Do you have a cigarette?" she said as if what I said was nothing but a whiff of air. I took a cigarette from my pocket and gave it to her. She pressed it on her lips and I handed her my lighter. Blowing smoke from her lips, she said, "I'm sorry, what were you saying?"
"Well, you said when you arrived at my door that you're here to help me out."
She just nodded. The tip of her cigarette glowed as she took long drags from it.
"Help me with what?" I asked.
"With your story!"
I sipped from my cup. "Ah,"
"Your problem is that you can't flesh me out on words. Well, here I am. What do you know about me?"
"Nothing."
She adjusted her eyeglasses with a finger. And then she sighed. "Since I came here to your house, what did you find out about me?"
I tried recalling everything. "When I opened the door, I knew at once that you're the girl I used to see at the library back in college. You like reading erotica and drinking coffee without sugar and cream because you said it makes you feel safe and sound," I said. Her eyes were focused on me as I spoke. She put the cigarette on her mouth, and I saw the trails of smoke gliding out of her lips. "And you smoke," I added.
"Good," she remarked. "Anything else you'd like to know?"
"Yeah," I started. "Are you the real girl in the library? I mean her...whoever she was."
"Of course not," she remarked, her eyes on me. "The real one's probably married now. Or she could be dead. Anything's possible. Not that you know anything for sure."
"I never knew her myself. I just watched and admired her," I said. I lit a cigarette. "Then if you're not her, then who are you?"
"I'm the girl in the library."
"I'm confused."
"I'm The Girl in the Library—a character from your story."
"I took that character from the real girl in the lib—"
"Would you like me to help you or not?" she interrupted. "You need help and you know it. I wouldn't be here if not because of it. Three straight days without a first draft? My God."
Cigarette smoke crawled on the back of my hand. "One last question," I said. She looked at me, listening. "So you're not real?"
She sighed irritably, as if trying not to say anything rude or harsh. "I think you've been spending too much time in reality that you've forgotten what's the difference between what's real and what's so...fiction." She stood in front of me and placed her palms on my cheeks. I felt the flow of life on her hands. “Hold me,” she said. I put my hands to her waist, and then traced the curves up to her waists. “Embrace me,” she added. I stood and did it. I felt her breasts press against my chest, and I could feel her breathing. “Does this look unreal to you?”
I let go of her. “I guess not,” I said.
“Then, better open your laptop and finish making my world,” she sneered, pointing on my laptop resting on the glass table in front of the couch.
My eyebrows narrowed. “Your world?”
“I’m in that story. So it’s my world. And frankly, I hate what you’ve done so far to the place. It’s all jumbled and full of unclear stuff. I hate that.”
We both sat back at the couch and I opened my laptop and double-clicked on the document where the unfinished rough draft of the story lay, unfinished. “See what I mean? And look at the title: “Something, 2012”? It sounds very crappy,” she added, putting a finger on the LCD screen.
I stared at the text I’ve written and tried reading, reflecting and analyzing it. The chunks of paragraphs were so pointless, unnecessary and like what the girl said, jumbled and full of unclear stuff.
“Fix it,” she demanded, with her mouth close to my ear. “I hate that world.”
She asked for an ashtray. I took one at the kitchen cabinet and we crushed our nearly burnt-to-the-butt cigarettes on it.
“I even hate this world,” she added as I went back to my seat.
“This world?” I turned my head on her.
“Well, I’m here in this world so it’s my world too.”
“You mean, even this,” I said, panning my head around. “This particular moment is a story?”
She nodded. She took another cigarette and lit it.
“If this is a story, then there’s got to be a reader,” I said, staring at the screen of my laptop, my eyes surveying a particular dialogue I wrote for the protagonist and the girl in the library.
“And there is one, watching over us now,” the girl replied.
“Oh, please. Now look who’s spending time in the world of the unreal,” I said while typing something that the protagonist said.
I heard her sigh, and smoke was curling away from her lips. “Did you look at the sky?” she asked.
I tried to recall, but I realized I haven’t looked at the sky for four days even though I spent a lot of time sitting on the yard. In fact, I remembered, I haven’t seen the sky since I started making a rough draft of the story about the girl in the library. “No, I haven’t.”
“So you didn’t see those pair of eyes hanging there above the sky?” she said like it was the most natural thing in the world. “Those eyes see through everything. Even on the tiniest things. They see even through your eyes.”
I dropped my gaze off my laptop. “Really?”
“See for yourself,” She crushed her second cigarette on the ashtray.
I went to my yard, and I was bathed in the rays of a blazing sun. I tried looking up but the sunlight blinded me. I put a palm over my head to shield away the sunlight, and saw, beside a few chunks of slowly rolling white clouds, a pair of eyes, hanging there like moons in the daylight. The eyes were staring at me, blinking, and the black pupils were slightly moving.
I went back inside. The girl was still there, sitting at the couch. “So the reader does exist,” I said. I sat beside her.
“The reader does nothing but judge us, you know. They just hang their eyes over there, observing, and wonder what’s going to happen next,” the girl replied.
“Nothing else?” I said.
She shook her head, and then spoke in a near-shout voice: “If the reader could do anything else then I want him or her to read out loud what I’m saying right now before this statement ends with a period and a quotation mark.”
She fell silent and looked up at the ceiling as if waiting for it to fall off. But nothing happened.
“See what I mean?” she sneered.
I stared at the screen of my laptop, trying to figure out if what I’ve written there made sense.
“You can do it,” she suddenly said.
I tried typing a few words I summoned from nowhere, but my fingers found the Backspace key as quickly as I punched-in the words.
I suddenly felt the weight of her head on my shoulder. Her hair brushed on my neck. “If I lean on you like this, could it help you concentrate on fixing the story?”
I gently nudged her head off my shoulder. She looked at me, quite bewildered. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I could do. The girl in the library was really…well, nothing.”
She just stared at me. The round pupils behind her glasses told she wanted me to continue.
“I just remembered her when I heard the song “Something” by The Beatles. And the girl, well, she was just there in the library, reading. Contrary to the title of the song, the girl was nothing.”
She looked at me, blinking, and then smiled. “She could still be something.”
“But I don’t know anything about her. I never approached her, never even talked to her. All I ever did was wonder why she’s alone, why she’s at the library…how would that spark any interest to a reader?” Or maybe, I thought, I’m too selfish to become a writer. All I have were these things inside of me.
“She remained in your memory, now that’s something,” she remarked.
I put a palm on my face, trying to think straight and logical as possible.
“You’re the writer. You could make her—me—be something to the reader,” she continued. I looked at her, and then I grabbed hold of her hand. It felt smooth.
“How?”
“That’s why I’m here. To help you out, remember?”
And then it hit me. The girl in the library was here, in front of me, unlike in memory where she was so far on the last rows of table in the library. Now she was here. Flesh. Real. 3D.
I reached a hand and took her eyeglasses. They were light. Without it, her face looked quite unfamiliar like I’m staring at the face of a total stranger. I put the eyeglasses on, hoping for a blotched vision, but instead my sight remained clear.
“Your eyesight’s—”
“—perfectly clear? Yes. I just wear those because I want to,” she took a cigarette and lit it.
I smiled. I handed her back her eyeglasses and she wore them at once, her visage returning to the proximities of familiarity.
“Tell me, what were you reading at the library? It couldn’t have been erotica. I mean, it’s a library in a university—” I said.
“I’m reading To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee,” she replied, politely.
“Why that?”
“So I’d look cool and mysterious. And it’s a great book. Of course, I wasn’t reading only that. There’s The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Reader’s Digest, World Almanacs—” she answered.
“In the age of internet surfing and online encyclopedias, you’re reading Almanacs?”
“I’m The Girl in the Library! I’m more on books!” she exclaimed.
I fell silent, and pondered for a while.
“Why don’t you provide something about me?” she added.
“Hmm,” I tried thinking about it. My head ached, so I just said the very first things that came. “You’re alone in the library because…because the library makes you feel safe and sound, the way nowhere else does. That ‘nothing’, is a ‘something’—like some sort of cave inside you. And always, in that library, when you read books, or outside when you read erotica or you drink coffee without sugar and cream, you feel you get that ‘something’ that could fill that ‘nothing’.”
She clapped her hands. “I like that. Put it there! Put it there!” she said, excitedly.
I opened my laptop and re-read what I’ve written so far. I began the story by stating the problems of the Narrator, who was a staring writer, on his characterization, which in my opinion now has become like a writer’s dilemma on which was real and which was not. And the unfinished part, I have to fill in. So, I typed, my fingers glided along the keys, letters appearing one after the other like a woman you picture out to yourself from her toenails up to the last strand of hair on her head. The girl in the library leaned her head on my shoulder, watching me finish the story, from the moment the Narrator heard the song “Something” by The Beatles to the time he learned about the girl in the library’s character.
Finally, I felt I was done. Revisions could be endless, but that would come later. “Do you think I should have done something?” I said to the girl in the library sitting beside me.
“About what?” the girl in the library beside me replied.
“To the girl in the library, in my memory. Maybe that way, I wouldn’t make up such things for use in my story.”
“If that happened, then I’d be appearing as a different character. And that story about—I couldn’t really say that the title’s good, though—the song “Something”, wouldn’t have been written.”
I just fell silent. I saved the file and closed the laptop. And then, the girl and I smoked together.
“Tell me,” she said. “Did you like her?” She was pertaining to the real girl in the library.
“I couldn’t say I liked her, but I’m not saying I don’t like her either. It was somewhere in between, I think. It’s like one of those moments where I really didn’t know what to do,” I stared at the cigarette smoke wafting around us for a while.
“So there was really something about the girl in the library,” she replied. She took a long drag from her cigarette.
I tried thinking about it for a while. “Maybe I saw something in her that I didn’t see on anybody. While the world revolved and evolved, and everybody was like everybody, there she was at the library—somehow, as something else.” I crushed my cigarette on the ashtray. “She made me feel safe and sound,” I added, followed by a chuckle. “Do you get what I’m trying to convey to you?”
“Yes,” she replied, flashing her teeth. “I really do.”
“Goodbye!”
The girl in the library waved a hand as she approached the gate of my house. I stood at the yard and watched her step out of the gate and then leave. After she was gone, I sort of wondered how she’s going back to her world. She didn’t get sucked by the LCD screen of my laptop. Maybe there was a bus that would cross the border of my reality, to the reality of my fiction.
I gazed up at the afternoon sky, and saw the two, big eyes, hanging like two visible moons in orbit. I know that as I go back to my house and close the door, the eyes would disappear and go somewhere else. Perhaps to travel back in time, or to completely leave.
As I take steps to go back to my house, I found myself singing the opening lyrics to “Something” by The Beatles. Funny, now I remember two girls in the library: one who was far away, whom I didn’t know, and another whom I just fleshed out, at some point, in my short story. Right there and then, I wondered if John, Paul, George and Ringo knew that one of their songs would give such an impact to a person long after their time.
I stepped inside my house and closed the door.
