{"id":461,"date":"2009-10-27T16:46:03","date_gmt":"2009-10-27T21:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/?p=461"},"modified":"2009-10-27T17:48:43","modified_gmt":"2009-10-27T22:48:43","slug":"the-big-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/2009\/10\/27\/the-big-three\/","title":{"rendered":"The Big Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I always loved reading and writing. When I was younger, I read and wrote as much as I could, but I never thought about being a writer. I didn’t think about being a writer until discovering two things: the movie, Time Bandits<\/em>, and Stephen King’s book, Different Seasons<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I saw Time Bandits<\/em> three times the weekend it opened. It was the first time I remember thinking, “Somebody wrote that!”<\/p>\n

The first time I watched the movie was for the fun of watching, and the other two times was with the intent of thinking how written words comprising a script became something magical on a movie screen.<\/p>\n

In 7th grade, I found a copy of Different Seasons<\/em> laying around the house. I hadn’t ventured into too much adult\/contemporary fiction at the time. The four stories in Different Seasons<\/em> seemed to be the perfect introduction to something more than what I was reading in school and on my own. If I didn’t like the stories, they weren’t so long that I would have been wasting my time. Fortunately, I liked every story in the book…especially “The Body.”<\/p>\n

Reading the story that was later made into the movie Stand By Me<\/em> made me want to write. It was the kind of story I wished I could write, and since it was in a book that was bought in a grocery store, it meant that there was a market for the kind of thing I knew I wanted to do.<\/p>\n

My big sister was a voracious reader. She devoured everything in print: newspapers, books of poetry, library books, books she bought, and books my mother bought. When I saw the copy of John Irving’s The World According to Garp<\/em> laying around, I picked it up and started reading. It was the thickest book I’d ever tackled in my 12 or 13 years alive.<\/p>\n

There was something about the book I couldn’t explain. It felt familiar; it felt like nothing I’d ever read before. I didn’t get everything about it, but it challenged me to try to understand every word and thing that happened in all those pages. More than anything, I remember feeling for all the characters. Not just, “Man, that’s rough,” but feeling as though they were people I personally knew, who faced all these strange curveballs that life throws our way.<\/p>\n

When I set the book down, I had a new favorite writer…somebody had finally unseated Jack London for top spot in my world.<\/p>\n

While John Irving was my favorite writer, I never had the desire to write like him. Oh, sure — the randomness that life throws our way is in the things I write, and I’m an unabashed emotional writer, but those aren’t traits owned by Irving, or even the people he looked up to (Vonnegut and Dickens — two of my other favorite writers).<\/p>\n

I like John Irving so much because I will never set out to attempt to write like John Irving. In his writing, there’s something I always love; even in the books he’s written that didn’t leave me feeling as floored as when I finished The World According to Garp<\/em> or A Prayer for Owen Meany<\/em>. But I will never attempt to thread words together or lay out a plot in the same way Irving does.<\/p>\n

Maybe I like Irving’s writing so much because I simply enjoy reading his novels. I don’t think about how he does what he does; I don’t want to do what he does. But for days or weeks, I can curl up on the couch and lose myself in stories that feel so familiar, but also feel like nothing I’ve read before.<\/p>\n

Today, John Irving’s latest, Last Night in Twisted River<\/em><\/a>, was released. I’m already savoring every word and looking forward to that bittersweet moment of finishing a book I’ve waited years for, but not wanting to ever end.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n

What writers or stories inspired you to write? Why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I always loved reading and writing. When I was younger, I read and wrote as much as I could, but I never thought about being a writer. I didn’t think about being a writer until discovering two things: the movie, Time Bandits, and Stephen King’s book, Different Seasons. I saw Time Bandits three times the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"categories":[62,22],"tags":[8,64],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}