I've just been reading about Dickens's A Christmas Carol. (See this week's quiz.) I was first introduced to this work by my 7th-grade English teacher, Mrs MacFarland. Now, that was an amazing lady, 70 if she was a day. She hadn't read the memo that said 13-year-old vocabularies couldn't handle Dickens in the raw. I learned the word 'facetious', because boys 'exchanged a facetious snowball' in A Christmas Carol. I went home and taught this word to my dad, who was a lifelong learner. When I overheard him telling an adult friend, 'I'm not being facetious here,' I chuckled and was secretly delighted. The power of Dickens.

Composing the quiz made me think more about the storytelling process.

It's well-known that Dickens was very committed in his imagination. He once said that sometimes, characters talked to him. One old lady in his story was so chatty that he had to tell her to shut up in church: she was distracting him. I have that experience in church, too, only it's angels. They crack up at funny hymn lyrics, make snide comments during the sermon, etc.

Which is why I don't look directly at the pastor. My mom sat in the choir once when I was a teenager. I was sitting on the front row because I played the piano and had to sneak over to it for the invitation hymn. After the service, she complained at me that I was making faces at the pastor during the sermon. I said that it was because I was listening and thinking so hard. She replied, 'Well, cut it out. You'd make anyone nervous.' So I don't stare at speakers in church, ever. Besides, the angels are too distracting.

Back to Dickens. When he finished A Christmas Carol, he got so excited, he danced around like a madman, according to the Telegraph. (They wouldn't lie, right?) He said he laughed and cried while he wrote the story. Why is this important?

I think it demonstrates Dickens's commitment to his story. He was living it in his head. And when it worked – when the characters came to life and talked back – Dickens became involved emotionally. He cared about what he was telling. And it shows. That book engages everyone who reads it, hears it read, or watches some film version of it. It changes them.

Think about it: before A Christmas Carol, Christmas was a neglected, unimportant holiday. After A Christmas Carol, people greeted each other with 'Merry Christmas'. (And, much later, Americans got into tedious arguments about political correctness.) Thomas Carlyle went out and bought a turkey. People gave to charity. Thackeray called the book 'a national benefit'. All that from a story.

It is astounding how powerful a little fiction can be.

The other thing that fascinates me about writers like Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe was their enormous mental powers. Think about this: they didn't have Word programs. Or internet connections. Or Google. They had a pen, a bottle of ink, and some paper. That's it. The whole narrative – every bit of dialogue, every description, every scrap of scenery, every reference – was in their heads. They had whole movies in there. They remembered things. And their stories are amazing, huge, vivid, holistic. They have power.

This is why I keep insisting that we exercise our powers of observation, memory, and empathy. I feel like we as writers owe it to Dickens, and Poe, and every other writer who's made our lives richer by their efforts. Let the rest of the denizens of the 21st Century go on patting themselves on the back that humanity has 'arrived'. Let them use the technology without thinking about it. Let them skip the process and think they're smarter than those who came before. Let them read their fake news and trade their cut-and-paste trivia. But we who have received the gifts from those brilliant minds – the ones who carried it all in their heads – have a job to do. We can't let it get lost, this ability to imagine. To feel a story.

I love my Word program. I can't work without it. I can move text around, correct spelling as I go. I don't get writer's cramp. I used to be frustrated because my handwriting is so poor that even I can't read what I wrote. Yay, keyboards. I'm a born keyboardist. I can type really fast, so I can think while I type. But long before the story's on the page, you know where it is? No, neither do I. It's somewhere else, out in some nebulous suburb of the Akashic. The only way to reach it is through the mind. So, engage brain before moving fingers about.

Writers are connected to the storytellers of old – far, far back, as far as human experience can reach, back to the campfires of the Palaeolithic. We're connected by that peculiar gift humans have, the ability to see imaginary events in our heads. Storytellers push those events around, try things out, figure out what the story is telling us. Then we put it all into an entertaining form and share it. Whether you get paid a lot or a little, or nothing at all except a smile and a 'Hey, that was cool!', it's all the same process. And every time we tell a story successfully, we've given other people a gift.

And it's not even Christmas yet.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

19.12.16 Front Page

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