Red Room Where the Writers Are

In Creative Writing classes, I was taught that you should never write stories that begin: “Bob was just a typical guy,” or “It was an ordinary day.”

We claim that such beginnings “bore” the reader from the very first line.

If the day is “ordinary,” then why tell the tale? If Bob is “typical,” then why do we want to read about him?

And, yet, my own personal story would begin no differently:

Sarah White is a typical Midwestern girl. She stands 5’6” tall with brown hair and brown eyes, right-handed, a size 10 (on most days), 8 ½ foot size, makes a middle-class wage, speaks with a Northwest Ohio “accent”—which is considered to be “no accent”—the one that broadcasters are taught to use in school. She tries not to lie, steal, cheat, kill (a hard one when driving around Chicago). She shows compassion when appropriate, leads a “laid back” life, not bothering to “fret” about most things.

Life has a way of sorting things out, if a person is patient and slow to anger.

A Protestant raised with a Puritan work ethic (hard work, limited spending), she possesses a last name that is as bland and ordinary as her complexion.

Sarah White is profoundly average. She is “the girl next door.” Her parents are still married. They live on the same street where she grew up, in the same house where her father carried her mother over the threshold. Her parents had two children: a boy and a girl.

Growing up, Sarah owned hamsters, fish, a poodle named P.J. and then a cat named George.

On Saturday nights, her parents made them watch the Lawrence Welk show. They would pop popcorn and watch The Waltons, MASH, Little House on the Prairie—she still recalls the cartoon Puff the Magic Dragon with a smile.

Sarah owns Star Wars figures, grew up with a mad crush on all of the heroes—Luke, Leia, and Han. She played with Barbies, skinned her knees while roller skating on the uneven sidewalks, learned to ride her bicycle on humid summer nights after supper.

Sarah White is extraordinarily ordinary. She grew up knowing both sets of her grandparents, who all lived in her same small town.

She even knew her great-grandmothers—two feisty women who did not “go gentle into that good night.” Her Grandmother White’s mother traveled the country until the very end of her life. Her Grandfather White’s mother, who had been divorced from her husband for decades and had not remarried, was a firm and fiercely independent New England woman.

With her ethnicity from England, Scotland, and Ireland, Sarah descends from a stock of people who forged the New World, fought in the Revolutionary War, and settled down to the expected lives of work and longing.

In the end, Sarah White is like anyone else.

She doesn’t believe that people are like snowflakes—each unique.

She cries and smiles and dreams and bleeds like every other human being on the planet, just as strong and just as fragile. She can become lost in a crowd and many people have told her that she “reminds them of someone else.”

Strangers already feel like they know her. Perhaps they do.

Maybe that’s the difference between life and a story—in stories, we try to create quirky people to make them seem “real,” but truth be told, our lives are mirrors of other lives that have come before us and that will echo after us.

Maybe we should celebrate the comfort inherent in that, instead of trying to make ourselves and our stories into something more than they truly are.

Even in our stories, we seem to be thirsting for “sameness.”

As the movie Shadowlands says, “We read to know we’re not alone.” Even in the exotic, we search for the familiar and that is what makes the connection electric. You are not me but like me and sometimes you are me.

Sarah White is just an average girl with plenty of stories to tell but none as powerful as the "ordinary" one she is living.