It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them

Today I was trying to write about poverty, only to realize that I really don’t understand any of it. But then I thought: “writers don’t have to be dead to kill off a character.” Writers don’t have to be murderers or murder victims to write about a murder either – and writers write about murders all the time! And wars (the ones in which they never participated)! And prostitution (although many do sometimes rightfully compare being a writer to being a whore)!

Writers don’t have to experience something to write about it, or all writers could ever write about would be reduced to the experience of being a writer (which a lot of writers have done already, again and again).

So I should be able to write about poverty! I should be able to use my imagination and imagine being someone who worries about being able to afford a meal that evening! But the truth is that I’m afraid of underrepresenting or overrepresenting the experience, which would be deeply offensive to those who actually suffer it. I also feel weird researching it by asking people suffering from poverty what the experience is like (“Hi, I’m so privilege that I cannot even begin to fathom what poverty looks like – could you tell me what it feels like to be so damn poor?”).

And now I’m worried: am I doomed to never be able to write about poverty, as long as I am not a victim of it? Am I doomed to write only about a relatively privileged girl aspiring to write about poverty?

Libraries of Livelies

I was reading Love in the Time of Cholera, and thought of how unattractive love often is when depicted in novels. Great love stories rarely make my heart leap or give me butterflies, when the major purpose of them is to affect their readers in such a way. My favourite literary characters have always been those that do not obsess over their lover or let themselves be defined entirely by their romantic life. Although they fall in love – because they are not heartless – they make no real big fuss about it.

It isn’t that I don’t want to read about love. In fact, there is not much else that interests me more than people and their relationships with others. It’s just that so often fictional love stories are unhappy, unhealthy, exaggerated, and pathetic – or boring as hell. And if love in fictions is so unattractive, what hope do we have for love in reality?

I think the reason why love in fictions suck is because all the writers have ever experienced are sucky loves (in my view). They write what they know, which just happens to be love between two weak-spirited and dependent people, expecting what they call love to save them. But it won’t, Florentino.