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I admit, more often than not, I am a literary snob.

Maybe it is the hours and hours I put in to get my English BA. Maybe the other hours I spent in lectures, readings and critique groups. Could be my collection of over 400 books. Could be my obsessive interest in Junot Diaz alongside my upmost respect for William Gibson. Could be the fact that reading Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicles taught me to understand writing fiction or that Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street opened my eyes on how to do do it.

I’m unsure, it could be a lot of things. Sometimes I feel bad about it. Most times, I don’t.

The only thing it really leaves me with is a sense of duty to my words. A motivation to layer it on and create a puzzle that needs to be made sense of. I am not happy when my writing is straight forward. I am not happy when my writing goes from point a to point b and there’s barely a hint of atmosphere or thematic storytelling in between. I don’t mind it in other people’s tales, but I can’t manage it in my own. I get down easily when I’m unable to make cross-character connections and dual moving plots that are really about the same thing but different.

My literary snobbery left me with a palpable desire to just want to make something that someone else will dissect. I love books sometimes just because of what they’ve tried to achieve. Even if the characters were a bit drab and the storytelling was convoluted. Just trying something new with literary form, with getting people paying attention, with testing the boundaries and deepening fiction kind of sets my heart off.

And when things connect, the layers form a latticework of understanding, I can do nothing but smile. I’m thrilled. There’s a theme, there’s an undercurrent, there is something aside the action and the thrills.

And that’s all I want to be able to do. Really. When I complain, it is all I am trying to do.

If that’s being a snob, well, you know, I’m okay with that.