Artwork by Michael DiMilo
When I first started writing this blog, I informed my family over dinner one night that I was planning to post one semi-lengthy piece every week and that I was not going to restrict myself to a any specific subject area or genre. I was going to go where the keyboard led me. My daughter suggested that I do a bi-weekly posting instead, because coming up with something new every week would become burdensome. And she was right; at times, it has. But most often, once I sit down and get started—and sometimes I’ll write anything to get started—I very often find myself heading somewhere I wanted to go to anyway. My keyboard, like a cowboy’s faithful horse, usually takes me where I need to go.
While browsing the internet recently, I happened to run across Brain Pickings, a website devoted to literature, and who should I see on the main page but my old friend Annie Dillard—a friend only in the sense that she speaks to me from the written page. She had been quoted from the beginning of her book The Writing Life:
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads.
True. Writing is—or should be—a process of discovery: sometimes violent, and sometimes painful, because that’s the only way to get to those hard-to-reach places. The somewhat weary “discovery” trope has done time in innumerable composition and creative writing classes, but it’s repeated so frequently because it rings true: discovery is one of the central drives behind writing, or any of the arts.
Which begins to beg the question: why do we write? Why do we read? What are we looking for? There are scores of obvious answers: we write to communicate, to entertain, to enlighten, to confess, or to accuse. And of course we write to reveal, to reveal the world, ourselves, the truth—elusive creature though it is—through our deepest emotional wellsprings. And we read for the same reasons.
Narrative fiction allows the writer—and the reader—to combine the acts of self-deceit and self-revelation behind the same thin veneer of illusion. Elements of the writer’s psyche are, deliberately or not, embedded within fictional characters, situations, and conflicts, and subsequently discovered by the readers, sometimes with a tinge of recognition or sometimes with a pang of guilt. Writers conceal. Readers reveal.
But in the process of creating narrative fiction, as the author constructs realistic characters, she may, perhaps unintentionally, uncover strata of emotion and drives embedded deeply in her own psyche, sometimes ingrained so far down that she was not even aware of them. Which is why laying down Dillard’s line of words can be so painful and so violent. What is unearthed may not look so pretty or smell so nice, and it may not reveal anything except an even deeper mystery.
Many fiction writers often seem to return to familiar turf in their works. Flannery O’Connor’s characters always seem to stumble into bizarre and violent epiphanies down South. Raymond Chandler always ends up on the neon-splashed streets of Los Angeles. James Ellroy always gets blood spattered on himself. Vladimir Nabokov, the master of the double—or triple—feint, is forever weaving himself, impeccably disguised, into his narratives. (So, in fact, are most writers, some consciously, some semi-consciously, though few do it as well as Nabokov.)
These trips home are part of a writer’s voice, their style. I pretty much know what I’m going to get with a new James Ellroy or a T.C. Boyle novel, but I’ll read it anyway. I even know what I’ll get, at least stylistically, with a new Hakira Murikama novel. Usually. So why do these authors keep returning to the same place, the same story? And why do we keep picking up novels by the same authors? Because we all face the same unfathomable mysteries every day. We face them over and over again. This is the human condition.
Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. (The Writing Life, Dillard)
Ms. Dillard is right again. This is the work that fiction does. As readers, we do “want waking,” but it seems as if the writers are striving for awareness, too. We all want—need—to be awakened from a dream, many times the same dream.
Writers lay down the line of words, delving, pushing, gouging, and hammering, going where the path leads. As readers, we are compelled to follow. At some level, we know where we’re all ultimately headed. We’re not sure why or how, but writing might give us a small and beautiful clue about our destination. We can only hope that writing might also give us a hint as to why we’re going there.