Writers of Influence

If we read much or often, and if we're writers we should, then we will soon find our world expanded through the beauty, struggle, and/or reality of another writer's work. One writer who does that for me is Tim O'Brien.

• Tim O'Brien is the man behind the book of short stories entitled The Things They Carried, which is a collection of war stories from Vietnam. The story that the book is named for can be found in full here.
• O'Brien says he wanted to resurrect the people he served with as fictional characters, to, as he says, "Cast a light on the things that have been forgotten."
• What I find interesting is the way in which he used real life to influence, inform, and inspire his fiction writing. The Things They Carried is filled with a group of characters who are people he served with, but used in a fictional way (and some of the characters are a conglomerate of multiple real people), which is a cross between fiction and nonfiction that I find fascinating.
• Surprisingly, Tim O'Brien influenced my writing by my willingness (or drive) to write my own "war stories," that showcase the best and worst of mankind in the same horrific events, and how do these events impact the lives around them? How do people recover from them? Do they recover? O'Brien wrote another story entitled "How to Tell a True War Story," in which he discusses Rat Kiley, a true person who becomes a character, in an even more direct way expressing how fact and fiction mesh.

The short story "The Things They Carried" opens with these lines:

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.

As we read through Jimmy Cross' story, we see how he copes with the war through imaginings about the elusive Martha, who keeps pieces of his soul clean (notice how he cleans his hands before reading her letters) while the rest of him is "dirtied" by war. It is a painful and personal story that hits me in the feels every single time I read it. O'Brien's style is very direct, yet he buries the truth within his narration, circling ever closer to the true moment by recycling the story and its impact on every other character in the story.

• This book is obviously a fiction war story, so if you went into the bookstore, you might find it shelved in war stories, fiction, or short story collections, but to me, it's a story about human strength and the ways in which we cope with horror.
• This story continues to resonate with me. I have been in and around the military my whole adult life, and I connect to O'Brien's characters by seeing pieces of them in the military men and women I know. The love of this story led me to O'Connor's "The Guests of a Nation" and the book Regeneration by Pat Barker, a fictional story about Siegfried Sassoon (if you took Brit Lit, I'm sure you've read Sassoon's poetry, particularly "The General").

I've written before about how this short story has on more than one occasion caused me to write about the things that I carry, the tangible and intangible. I carry a messenger bag and a laptop. I carry parental guilt and debilitating fear.

What do you carry?

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They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”