Obviously, when I was a kid, I spent way too much time around dogs.
Growing up as an only child in a 3rd world country had made my life an oxymoron in so many ways. Because I was all they had, and because the news always featured a dead child for one reason or another every day, my parents were super-vigilant and didn’t like me playing outdoors with other children. We didn’t live in a middle-class subdivision, so there were no security guards or housekeepers to keep an eye on me; children in my neighbourhood more or less played out on the narrow, stinking streets to their hearts’ content. I remember two boys who made it all the way to the highway and got hit by a truck. One got a broken leg; the other died.
Also–because I was all they had, even though they didn’t make a lot of money, my parents could afford to send me to a private Christian school. It was a very good school with an international curriculum, but it also made me stand out. In the afternoons, the bus would have to drop me off outside the squatters’ settlement where I lived and my busmates, who lived in nicer subdivisions with nicer streets, would get stuck for hours in traffic. Hostility ran high and was often directed at me. I didn’t know how to deal with it. Nobody else seemed to, either; the bus driver often dropped me off at the side of the highway to walk all the way back home, and my parents frequently got into arguments over it. One time, I was left all alone in school in the middle of a typhoon. This was back in the 90s, when cellphones weren’t popular, and I had to wait hours until my parents realized I wasn’t coming home and braved the flood to fetch me.
But that’s not the point of the story. The point of this story are the dogs. Mine, or the neighbour’s, or random strays. They kept me company after school or on the weekends. I spent so much time with them that I think that’s why I grew up to be as honest and straightforward as I am now. When you spend too much time with dogs, you find all the basic emotions stripped down to the core: sadness, anger, joy, and especially love. There is envy, too, and deceit–compared to other animals, dogs mirror our emotions really well. They just haven’t had the time to learn to build up all the crap around it the way we have.
As a writer, being at arm’s length from my emotions at all times has its advantages. Cause and effect is seen almost immediately, and I am able to pinpoint things like motivations and reactions without too much trouble. Also, I spend a lot of time thinking about the things I write. People think that writing is about spewing out flowery words and pretty sentences, which isn’t true at all; writing is about getting to the point as quickly and as painlessly as possible. This is true for most forms of writing, be it in journalism, how-to guides, technical manuals, or fiction.
Except maybe for blogs. I think I’m allowed to ramble in my blogs.
