A good novelist writes like an ethnographer and a good ethnographer writes like a novelist (Bochner, 2004).

Quiet Saturday afternoon. It is very cold but sunny outside. I want to sit in a beautiful café and enjoy conversation with a friend. Instead, I am sitting with other graduate students and working on my methodology chapter. It has taken a while to turn on my laptop and concentrate on my writing because I am deeply disturbed by stupidity of human race.  I have not realized how much I get disturbed by people’s stupidity. I wanted to update my status on Facebook and let friends know how people’s stupidity makes me angry. Then I have realized, no body cares what I feel but typed quickly a few words in a word document “it’s not wrong not to have enough intelligence. It’s wrong to belittle intelligence of others by your limited intelligence.”  So here I am. I have pushed my anger to somewhere and forced my brain to write about my research methodology.

I am not a novelist but want to write my thesis like a novelist. I am not an ethnographer but want to do ethnographic research. However, I will tell my own stories in my ethnographic research, not others. Therefore, it is an autoethnography where I want to write like a novelist. I could not go to a nice café but someone has brought a large coffee for me. I am having a beautiful conversation with a friend, Carolyn Ellis while sipping my warm coffee. I hope Ellis would not mind to call her my friend. She does not know me but I know her. I have been reading everything that Ellis has written so far about autoethnography. I can not help myself to notice how Ellis and I have similar thoughts and experiences sometimes. So, I cannot stop responding to her while I read her. I feel I am beside her writing desk and talking to her as Ellis and Bochner do sometimes.

All my life, I have loved to read stories (Ellis, 2004).

I have also loved to read and listen stories. I remember when I was a child how I craved for stories. I did not eat or sleep without stories. However, it was not like what I watch bed time story in Hollywood movies. My story time was not limited to only bed time and nobody read stories to me from children books. They told me their stories. They shared their stories with me.  It was very difficult for my mother or caregivers to feed me without telling stories. They enjoyed telling me stories because I was not a fussy listener. They could tell me any stories they want but it had to be stories. So, I know who was my mother’s first crush and my father’s ex-girlfriend. I knew who was my nanny’s boyfriend in her village and how she missed him. I still remember all the folklore or folktales that my grandmother loved to tell at the evenings of summer. I can still smell my grandmother and feel her old skin.

Why then did I never consider becoming an English major or a creative writer (Ellis, 2004).

I did. I have an English major. However, I did not consider to become a creative writer but I enjoyed reading English literature. Why did I not consider to become a creative writer? I have tried to explain it in the following section.

I don’t recall being encouraged or discouraged about my writing while I was in high school or college (Ellis, 2004).

I don’t recall being always encouraged about my writing while I was in high school or college. My mother said it was a waste of time when she found my notebook full of rhymes and poems. She said I copied my cousin and I should forget to write these nuisances and paid attention to my study. My cousin had a beautiful thick red notebook full of her creative writings. I wanted to show my family that I also had a creative talent like my cousin.I did not write a single word in my faded old notebook after my mother’s reaction. One of my brothers used to write stories and hid his writing from everyone else. However, we found it from his hidden place. I liked my brother’s story. He became someone big in his baby sister’s eyes who could write a story! He was my superhero. My other siblings found it too and they read aloud stories from his personal notebook in front of other family members. Everybody laughed so hard as writing a story was a big joke, as writing a story was not a masculine thing. My brother’s personality was/is very quiet. He did not/ does not talk much. His voice was/is not loud. When my family was mocking his story, he was smiling feverishly. My brother did not say a word but did not write after that (Or I did not find anything). I felt sorry for him and wanted to tell him, “please, write for me. I will read and I will never laugh at you”.

I wrote a couple of stories in school and university. Perhaps, I wanted to follow my brother. I was so excited after writing all those stories that I wanted to have readers at once. My readers were my friends because there was no blog or social media at that time. I ruined their afternoons and evenings, and forced them to listen to my stories. There was no direct encouragement but had enough discouragement when they did not show their excitement as mine. When I finished my reading to them, they uttered only one word “good” and moved to another topic. One word was not enough for me. I wanted to hear more. I wanted to tell them how I came up with a plot, character, and story line. There is always a story behind a story. I wanted to tell them those behind stories. I wanted to tell them how I felt when I wrote those stories. We had poets and singers among our friends and they were acceptable, welcomed, and loved by my friends but not a storyteller. A storyteller was always invisible to them as she never existed. Then one day, someone told me “Why you don’t write. You must write.” I looked at that person carefully and realized I was not invisible to everybody. I was encouraged to write after that because I was visible to someone as a storyteller. It was my first and significant encouragement to my writing.

I still write but not often. Sometimes, it gets published in online and offline. I do not have wide range of readers. I have many friends and they read many things but not my stories. However, it does not matter because I always get “someone” in a crowd. I write for that “someone” who believes in me as a storyteller.