The typewriter was an antique.
Johnny's da left it to him when he was still a baby. He then left to fight the great war in a far away land. He fought for strangers whom he had never met, and he died for a family he had abandoned behind.
Johnny rocked his chair. He puffed a tiny smoke from his equally ancient pipe. He coughed. Bad tobacco that was, he grumbled. Maria, his caregiver, had always wanted him to stop smoking. This had been her way to make him stop.
Johnny started typing on his antique. Wrinkled skins and arthritis ridden bones started to move in a familiar rhythm. It was a familiar music for Johnny. His only music in this care facility.
A young man once told Johnny that writing novels were easy. "If you can write short stories, you can write novels," said he. "If you understand what makes a short story work, you understand the basics of storytelling, which is essential for novel writing."
Johnny remembered that he nodded his head when he heard that advice, many decades ago. Who was he to disagree? The nice young man was a writer. Johnny was not. He was a young husband with two little kids to feed. So he followed his dad's example. He went to faraway land and fought the Vietcongs.
When Johnny took his first life, the sun was shining brightly back then in Vietnam. As it was the day Johnny's wife died, and he decided to take out his dad's antique typewriter from the attic.
He was going to type again. But his novel had been going slow. So he decided to type a letter instead.
"Writing short stories are like fighting wars." Johnny wrote. "It is exciting. It is thrilling. You compress your entire life into a single page, a single minute of your life. Will you live? Will you die? Your entire existence reduced to a single event. For that minute, nothing else matters."
"Reading short stories is like masturbating." Johnny continued. "It is an intellectual and emotional masturbation. You want something short and easy, so it does not tax your already fatigued brain, but you want it to scratch your itch for some emotional and intellectual connection. You want to feel again and you want to think again, really think, for things that matter. Things other than the mortgages and the reports that you have to write for your boss, and the kids. So for a few minutes, you read short stories about the compressed lives of other people. People who you thought had lived more interesting lives than you. And for a single minute or two, for a single event or two, these people may have lived more interesting lives."
Johnny sighed. He puffed another smoke from his pipe.
"But writing a novel is like living a life. They are long and they are boring, but they are your life. Someone once told me that fiction is real life without the boring bits. I scoffed at him when he said that. I replied back then, "Son, those boring bits are the very definition of a real life."
Many, many years ago, I killed a man in a faraway jungle, in a faraway land. I didn't know that man. But I took his life anyway. I could remember that moment as clear as if it was yesterday. It was hard, but in a way, that was easy.
I could write about that moment. It would be thrilling. For a minute or two. I could compress my entire existence into a single event. It was an important event, don't get me wrong. But for the grace of God, I would have ended the same way my dad did. Fighting and dying for people I never knew, while abandoning those I do.
But if I want to write a novel. That moment would not do. It was short, and God had decided that day that I was to live a much longer life. He had decided otherwise for that poor young man. He had died defending the country that he knew. I had killed him for a country that I didn't.
If I want to write a novel, I have to write the boring bits. The boring bits, as I said before, are the very definition of life. Your mother, my wife, used to cook us this delicious scrambled eggs. I can still remember when the three of us used to wait impatiently on our tables for the meal to arrive.
And do you remember how you scrapped your knees when you tried to ride your brother's bike? I was so glad that you were not badly injured. I could not say the same for your brother's bike. The tree did not take kindly of you ramming the bike that was not yours into it. I remember how your brother refused to speak to you for a month afterwards.
In essence, that was life, my son. It was not the firefights or the act of heroism. It was the simple moments, one after another, in a chain of unbroken existence that stretched from the beginning of time.
So as you read his letter. Know that my prayers are with you and your family. Be safe my son. I know that you felt that it was your duty to our country to fight in some faraway mountain, in some faraway land, but please, I beg you. Don't make the same mistake that my dad, your grandfather, made in Normandy. Please don't give your life for some strangers that you do not know, not when you have a loving family that you do know, waiting for you, at home.
Yours sincerely,
Your loving father."
Johnny folded the letter and closed his eyes. "That novel just have to wait," he decided. "Maria!" he shouted, "where is that scrambled eggs !?"
YOU ARE READING
On Short Stories and Novels
Short StoryA short story about short stories and novels :)