Welcome back to this month’s discussion thread for subscribers. Today, I wanted to talk about why we write fiction and ask your thoughts about it. This follows a discussion last month on reading fiction as well as a recent guest post on
‘s publication where I discussed the evolution of my experience with publishing fiction on this platform. She has a weekly series where other fiction writers have also shared their fascinating responses, starting with her own.
Some of the reasons for writing fiction are similar to reading it. This might include feeling empathy, investigating ethics, seeking beauty or truth in the world, and other reasons we looked at last month. I think for some people, however, the reasons might be quite different or at least extend into different territories.
I wrote an article for The Writing Cooperative that examined this question from the perspective of several writers: Zadie Smith, Paul Auster, and Jacques Derrida (not fiction, but still applicable in the way he suspends reality in diving into philosophical and metaphysical concepts).
⬩Quite a few studies have looked at the mental health benefits of writing despite the trope of the struggling, depressed writer. With fiction specifically, one is truly free to dive into one’s imagination for escape or conversely to flush out ideas and feelings related to one’s memories (or dreams and aspirations). One can play with the various decisions one faces or has faced in life, considering different outcomes. One can find humor or purpose in difficulty.
⬩Previously, I investigated the way I think writing can expand time in Writing Toward Immortality (with Derrida and Queen references). I believe that paradoxically in taking the time away from other parts of our lives to write, we can create a kind of reflection on our realities that allows them to have a bigger effect (or Deleuzian Affect perhaps) on the passage of our days and in the scope of our memories.
⬩I gave a lecture on the reasons I write fiction and the way it comes from my research in comparative literature and cultural studies. One reason I write fiction is to play with those ideas and think about them in new ways, whether it’s investigating culture’s connection to place or the way identity is impacted by borders. There are a lot of directions this can go in, but it’s at the heart of the writing I now do and what I look at in the podcast about layering fiction.
⬩A lot of (fiction) writers talk about a compulsion to write. I feel better if I write. I have to write whether I like it or not. I relate to this feeling. When I am writing, I am functioning better overall, but sometimes there’s also the danger to dive in too deep. Even though I’m someone who likes to / needs to eat every couple of hours, I can go most of the day with just coffee if I’m in the middle of some intense writing. I’m not suggesting that’s a good thing! In this jaunt of writing (etc etc etc) full time these past couple years, I’ve had some days where I think man, I didn’t really leave that bench. In addition to eating frequently, I’m someone who likes to / needs to move a lot. I’m convinced that this tethering to my work bench at times led to a stress fracture in my ankle, the first in thirty years as a competitive runner (and I’m not currently competing; but the ankle is fine now!). Essentially, I think a lot of this is about balance. For me, this writing works better in contained intervals, even if it’s nice to also have, say, unstructured time on a holiday or weekend to just go for it.
wrote about this concept recently with eloquent rawness and I’ve had conversations with other writers about finding the balance between structure and freedom in one’s life to write.
I’d love to see this go in whatever direction your writing takes you or the considerations you have in the time you spend writing fiction. (A few other links at the bottom.)
🎙 The podcast series is coming back in a few weeks, so I’ll pause these discussion threads for now. Hopefully, the podcasts will lead to such conversation. The purpose of them is provoke in a similar with with some conversational ideas of my own or quotes from theorists and fiction writers that can allow us to think about the spaces of fictions.
∞ Here are a few other links related to today’s topic to spark some ideas:
Great question, although I don't really feel "qualified" to answer for myself as such, as I mostly write essays. I have written short fiction before though, and think that for me it was almost like a workout for words. I would try to use observations of people watching, or memories, and enjoy the challenge of wrangling them into short, complete "episodes" or snapshots. Now that I think about it, this challenge (especially as i tended to economise on words to write micro fiction) led to my development as a writer in general. I think perhaps it feeds into my essays in a way that makes them almost like telling a "story", and provides a template for a beginning, middle, and end which feels natural. I honestly never considered that my fiction and non-fiction were linked! So thank you for this prompt! 😀
Thank you, Kate! You are certainly qualified, in my opinion. :)
It's interesting because the methods and effects you describe could also be used in non-fiction of course. Often, I think we don't need to separate so clearly. There are reasons at times, of course, but some of the playing with ideas and atmosphere or character are also useful in essays, for example. Thanks again!
Ah, great question. I posted a note about this recently, but this is so much better! And great resources to dig deeper, as always. Excellent.
In the words of Ray Bradbury :
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.
I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour's writing is tonic. I'm on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats. [...]"
—Ray Bradbury: Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You
I have noticed similar symptoms whenever I go through periods without writing and looking back even throughout my professional career at Blizzard, I wrote, be it movie reviews, documentation on how to do xyz, game design documents, and so forth.
Oh gosh, didn't mean for you to go digging! Sorry about that. I see it was this quote you shared. What a great one. I haven't read this book by Bradbury but love his writing.
I like this idea that "reality can destroy you"...or that we make our own reality and much of that space is what lives in our minds.
No worries, it was a recent notes, so only a little scrolling was required. Yep, I love Ray’s work and indeed, reality is but a simulation, I know l, I sound like a broken record by now, Baudrillard this, desert of the real and all that. 😅
Here's my ha'ppence on it: Germinal was a love of reading great literature, starting at about 10 years of age with Great Expectations by Dickens. The suggestion came from a wonderful young teacher, and truth being stranger than fiction, his name was Scrivener. Tragedy being a good portion of life, Mr Scrivener fell asleep at the wheel of his car on the way back from the Edinburgh Festival. News of his death was handed to us by the headteacher, a rail-thin alcoholic madam in a patent leather catsuit (it was 1971). I remember how cold and clammy the arm of the chair became. FF 50 years: I'm an early riser, most days up by 5am, early to bed too. I have a 2-3 hour window every morning in which to write. I often play internet chess instead, or my bass guitar (with headphones on), but mostly I write. I write novels, because they are where I pitch myself, and I do it primarily as the arena where my whole being (gestalt) is freest to think/write what I want, from my deeply personal self (I know...), which is a language machine more than anything else, with a long history of reading and writing. The actual craft of novel writing is the other fascinating, because difficult and complex, element driving me on. I too still fall asleep at the wheel of my vehicle, but unlike Mr Scrivener, I can always revise.
This is too wonderful that your writing mentor was "Mr. Scrivener"! Perhaps a reincarnation of Melville himself? Sorry to hear about his tragic, early demise. It sounds like this perhaps had an even greater effect in your pursuit of fiction.
I, too, like to write in the early morning when the mind is fresh and day is still emerging.
Hola Kate! Ahem: I think of writing as a bag of marbles - without the bag, I'm in a million pieces flying in all directions; with the bag, a simulacrum of sanity. 🤪
This is a very interesting post. I don't write fiction, but I like to read it. You mention playing around with ideas, and I guess I enjoy that in the fiction I read.
Perhaps I should go away and think about why I don't write fiction 😊
Well, this made me laugh. As long as it is 'homework' you enjoy, then I'm all for it!
I think Kate Jones here (and my response) start to look also at the crossover in non-fiction / fiction and the ways we might use elements of fiction in an essay, for example. You certainly do. There's a lot of storytelling and immersive elements.
So strange going back to that part of my life again and trying to sort things out. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an artist. An animator for Walt Disney studios. I was actually pretty good at it, and even enrolled in a correspondence course (think: DRAW WINKY.) And then when I was around 14-15 for some reason I wrote a poem. I had a teacher in 9th grade who read us a story. THE SNOW GOOSE, by Paul Gallico. I'd never had anyone read a story to me before -- my parents were immigrants and English was a second language. I started writing poetry. But they were poems of adventure like GUNGA DIN. I wrote one that was about five pages long that I sent off to the Queen of England. I even got a reply. I was 16. I still have the letter stapled to my wall. December, 1974. And then I read Tennyson's IDYLLS OF THE KING and wanted to write a novel that was a poem.
What I think it was with me, was not so much a compulsion, as it was the creative aspect of it all. I could write adventure stories to entertain myself. I had no idea of where I could send them. I didn't have access to a lot of magazines. The only library I was visiting was the school library. I wrote my poetic novel after I graduated. My parents gave me the year off to come up with something. It was the feeling of bringing characters to life; it was like I was painting pictures with words. I was starting to write stories for my own enjoyment. I came up with my character Jack Of Diamonds when I was around twenty. Forty-five years later, I've brought him to life. I came up with my King Arthur tale at around the same time. I started to write it in duo-tang notebooks left over from high school. I wrote out a table of contents to use as a plot, and am using that same table of contents for the story I've been putting up on my 'stack.
I never thought about sending anything in to publishers at that time. When I tried to send some short stories in, the rejection slips piled up. And then I got married and we had kids, and the writing went on the back burner for a few years. I started writing my magnum opus when I was 28. I know that because that was the age I made my protagonist. I wrote and rewrote that three times. I now call it my apprenticeship.
Now I write novellas mostly, or novelettes. And I suppose I write novels as well. I still write to entertain myself. I enjoy layering my stories with the five senses; I enjoy trying to write from different POVs. I enjoy challenging myself, and while not compelled to write and instead find myself playing on the computer, when I sit down to write, I will write for hours. I suppose when it comes to writing I simply enjoy the escapism it offers me.
Really love the way much of this goes back to school experiences and libraries. I think a lot of what we can discover especially at a young age can help us to find what it is we want to explore and pursue later on. I love all the reasons you write, Ben! Entertaining yourself...well that might be the best one I've heard. :) Thank you!
I love this question. For me, when I write I know a gauge direction I want to move in but when I get my pen and note pad out (yep old school) that mind hand connection happens and It’s very freeing. Bit deep tbf but hey I lie the flow 🤩
I also like to do a lot of pen and paper. I know what you mean, it's both a deep connection and helps to slow me down a little or make it more intentional.
Simply put, writing and reading good fiction is exhilarating. Get the same kind of feeling traveling to a new place, snow skiing on a mountainside, riding motorcycle in shorts and a T-shirt, creating something in the workshop. Hard to beat.
Hey, I know what I write is fiction, and I know I read is fiction. But that isn’t how it feels.
I’m not saying I don’t know the difference between fiction and reality. It’s not that at all. It’s that I don’t think when we read and write, we experiences such a stark division. Indeed, I think to do leads to us being cut off, closed down from life.
I do think we find the truth in fiction when we read, and so by what seems an inevitability, when I write I can only write the truth. As Elizabeth Bowen put it: ‘The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie.’ So, I do think it useful in the discipline of writing fiction to remember the ‘lie’ component, but only in so far as it serves the truth by providing it with an interesting framework and plot to engage the reader in that truth. It is perfectly possible, I think, to hold the two together in one’s mind as one writes. And I think fiction can allow one to use a truth to tell the lie/fiction (I think fiction is a softer, more generous way of putting it…although I dig Bowen’s rigour) to tell a different, more universal truth to the (perhaps) personal one(s) at the origin of a story. I guess that may be part of what makes translating so fascinating for authors and translators.
And that makes writing really interesting and exciting and alive.
I’m moved by what other writers say about this, because I think all writers think about it. Alan Hollinghurst, one of the most skilful authors in queer literature, talks of the excitement of writing the truth; Garth Greenwell said in a New Yorker piece in 2017 ‘I think literature is the best technology we have for communicating the experience of consciousness, for capturing what thinking feels like.’
I’ve read fiction for years but written it only relatively recently. I can’t for the life of me work out how I survived for so long without writing it (I guess by using words as well as I could to write heaps of other fact stuff for work) I’m not saying it’s all wonderful…it’s hard and exacting. But the possibility of doing it, of writing the truth, is enough to keep me trying.
I think of Kate Atkinson who spoke about the wonder of writing entirely for herself, with no one reading what she wrote but her. I get that, but I also get the other side of that (which she must too in order to publish). There is something mysterious in the act of writing knowing one might be read. I don’t think it is narcissistic or exhibitionist, I don’t think it is didactic, I think it is something far more primitive: a wish to communicate the self to others, to share somehow what thinking feels like. It’s a risk…what if people don’t like what you write? Terrible things have happened throughout time for precisely that reason. But, the urge to use words creatively to tell stories to tell the truth is, Imfeel, irresistible and to try and resist is unhealthy.
Really like this, Nicolas. Fiction is a part of your (very real) life. This riff really speaks to me.
I haven't read Atkinson yet and think I need to remedy this. I see she's on some UK curricula and never really had her on my radar.
I think a lot of what you speak of in relation to her, especially, is implicit in Solenoid, which Nathan Slake and I are doing a post on in a few weeks. Hope you like it! Thanks for the great comment.
Thanks for this great question and your thoughts on it. I can attest to the mental health benefits. A day goes better after writing -- even is it's unusable. The focus, attention, presence, inviting the creative force, listening to the muse - all expand consciousness and calm what the meditators call monkey mind. I can also relate to feeling driven. When I began my clifi novel, it was from a sense of urgency. I had a message that needed to be delivered ASAP. (Eventually learned this is not a recipe for a good novel! haha) Now, I enjoy challenging my imagination by nudging the people in my stories to the edges and centering other beings, like a tree or a stream or heron. I love the idea that nature speaks to us and even has opinions about us, but we've lost the ability to tune in. If we rediscovered how to listen, who knows what might happen next?
Your deep connection with nature through your work and your response are so wonderful, Julie! I think there's a lot of zen-like truths that can be found in this approach.
I also love the point that it's worth it even if it's unusuable. This happens to me all the time, and I've learned that it's just a part of the process. Separately, it's also purposeful just for me it never makes its way toward something else. Thanks so much for this comment.
This reminds me of an interview with Neal Gaiman, about writing every day. He said a ome days go very well and magical things happen. And some days are a slog. But in the final version of the story no one can tell which was which.
Kate, I enjoyed reading everyone's responses since I have never written fiction. I love to read fiction but haven't ever felt compelled to write it. Maybe someday but at this point I am more comfortable with essays. Perhaps a question I should ask myself is why I am sticking with what is comfortable?
Thanks for this comment, Matthew. Really good question -- should the writing we do feel comfortable? I don't have a firm answer but it's one to explore. Maybe a different way of putting it would be why does it feel uncomfortable? I occasionally ask myself questions like this. Sometimes I push myself to try something different that feels unnatural. Usually it ends up as a good exercise but better work comes from a space of flow, so to speak.
I am more experienced as an essayist, but I have a couple of published stories and an unpublished novel. Fiction, for me, has a higher standard than nonfiction in the sense that there is no backbone of fact to prop up its legitimacy. I think of it like spinning a yarn to a stranger. A life story demands a certain amount of respect, even if poorly told, because it happened to you. But bad fiction can be dismissed out of hand, because it's not real. Therefore, the bar is higher -- fiction has to cast a more enduring spell, even if many of the narrative tools are interchangeable.
For those reasons I've found it a fiction writing practice more grueling. It's easier to get discouraged, feel like the magic is fading. I know the secret is to take it somewhat less seriously, to embrace the page as a playground. But I also need to feel high stakes for writing to feel worthwhile.
It's interesting that I see beauty as more central to the purpose of fiction than truth. Which is to say that nonfiction often feels like a more didactic form -- a space more conducive to reflection, or at least where scene can be more readily broken by overlays of sense-making. Fiction conveys truth, for sure, but I think it has to do so slantwise. The first order of business is to create something of beauty, a world that one wants to inhabit, a character whose inner struggle is eased now and then by delight. I know that some write fiction for plot, to see what happens or to create the urgent tension that moves toward release. But I don't read fiction written that way. And so my own practice is more devoted to images than to cliffhangers.
Thanks for this personal and varied reflection, Joshua.
Agree, the bar feels higher somehow, or maybe it's that the bar is more elusive? The rubric is difficult to write because the barriers keep shifting and the author can shift or create new barriers oneself.
I agree that even when my researched nonfiction takes me many hours to ensure its thoroughness, it feels somehow safer, surer. The end goal is clearer in my mind, even if it evolves along the way.
Beauty and truth. Hand in hand. Cheers for this comment.
You're right, Joshua. My first book was a memoir, and most things I have written since have been fiction. And the memoir was SO EASY by comparison, simply because I knew what was going to happen next. I knew which side of the road things happened on. I could see the weather. One of the hardest things about fiction is the endless, endless choice.
You’re right there. I could try being ‘clever’ about it, but he was a great ray of light coming out of the blue in his bell-bottom Levi’s and long hair right into my dark suburban disfunction.
I like the reductive quality of the response. It breathes with intention!
I like all these reasons and feel this is a part of my process as well. It's interesting the way reading came first, which is something several discuss here (Ben W for example).
Great question, although I don't really feel "qualified" to answer for myself as such, as I mostly write essays. I have written short fiction before though, and think that for me it was almost like a workout for words. I would try to use observations of people watching, or memories, and enjoy the challenge of wrangling them into short, complete "episodes" or snapshots. Now that I think about it, this challenge (especially as i tended to economise on words to write micro fiction) led to my development as a writer in general. I think perhaps it feeds into my essays in a way that makes them almost like telling a "story", and provides a template for a beginning, middle, and end which feels natural. I honestly never considered that my fiction and non-fiction were linked! So thank you for this prompt! 😀
Thank you, Kate! You are certainly qualified, in my opinion. :)
It's interesting because the methods and effects you describe could also be used in non-fiction of course. Often, I think we don't need to separate so clearly. There are reasons at times, of course, but some of the playing with ideas and atmosphere or character are also useful in essays, for example. Thanks again!
Ah, great question. I posted a note about this recently, but this is so much better! And great resources to dig deeper, as always. Excellent.
In the words of Ray Bradbury :
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.
I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour's writing is tonic. I'm on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats. [...]"
—Ray Bradbury: Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You
I have noticed similar symptoms whenever I go through periods without writing and looking back even throughout my professional career at Blizzard, I wrote, be it movie reviews, documentation on how to do xyz, game design documents, and so forth.
Writing is my oxygen.
MOre soon (supposed to be writing!!) but just quick - if you have a link to that Note, please share it with us 🙏
Notes are hard to find once posted! 😅 It was in essence that quote from Bradbury's book. I, too, am writing, ahem. Off I go.
https://substack.com/@alexanderipfelkofer/note/c-54488923
Oh gosh, didn't mean for you to go digging! Sorry about that. I see it was this quote you shared. What a great one. I haven't read this book by Bradbury but love his writing.
I like this idea that "reality can destroy you"...or that we make our own reality and much of that space is what lives in our minds.
Thank you Alexander!
No worries, it was a recent notes, so only a little scrolling was required. Yep, I love Ray’s work and indeed, reality is but a simulation, I know l, I sound like a broken record by now, Baudrillard this, desert of the real and all that. 😅
Baudrillard is always in my ear 😆
Great quote by Bradbury, and also by yourself re: oxygen.
👍
Here's my ha'ppence on it: Germinal was a love of reading great literature, starting at about 10 years of age with Great Expectations by Dickens. The suggestion came from a wonderful young teacher, and truth being stranger than fiction, his name was Scrivener. Tragedy being a good portion of life, Mr Scrivener fell asleep at the wheel of his car on the way back from the Edinburgh Festival. News of his death was handed to us by the headteacher, a rail-thin alcoholic madam in a patent leather catsuit (it was 1971). I remember how cold and clammy the arm of the chair became. FF 50 years: I'm an early riser, most days up by 5am, early to bed too. I have a 2-3 hour window every morning in which to write. I often play internet chess instead, or my bass guitar (with headphones on), but mostly I write. I write novels, because they are where I pitch myself, and I do it primarily as the arena where my whole being (gestalt) is freest to think/write what I want, from my deeply personal self (I know...), which is a language machine more than anything else, with a long history of reading and writing. The actual craft of novel writing is the other fascinating, because difficult and complex, element driving me on. I too still fall asleep at the wheel of my vehicle, but unlike Mr Scrivener, I can always revise.
This is too wonderful that your writing mentor was "Mr. Scrivener"! Perhaps a reincarnation of Melville himself? Sorry to hear about his tragic, early demise. It sounds like this perhaps had an even greater effect in your pursuit of fiction.
I, too, like to write in the early morning when the mind is fresh and day is still emerging.
Thanks for this wonderful comment, Edy.
Hola Kate! Ahem: I think of writing as a bag of marbles - without the bag, I'm in a million pieces flying in all directions; with the bag, a simulacrum of sanity. 🤪
Ah, so good. 💜
Hehe, I love this Troy.
Also, second time I've read the word simulacrum today...
Great word. Somewhat uncommon. Something synchronous must be afoot in the universe.
This is a very interesting post. I don't write fiction, but I like to read it. You mention playing around with ideas, and I guess I enjoy that in the fiction I read.
Perhaps I should go away and think about why I don't write fiction 😊
Well, this made me laugh. As long as it is 'homework' you enjoy, then I'm all for it!
I think Kate Jones here (and my response) start to look also at the crossover in non-fiction / fiction and the ways we might use elements of fiction in an essay, for example. You certainly do. There's a lot of storytelling and immersive elements.
Thanks Jeffrey!
Just gave this some thought a few weeks ago.
I write fiction because:
1) It allows me to empathize with other people and cultures
2) I can construct and manipulate words and worlds at will
3) The greatest lessons are often packaged in stories. I fill mine with questions about the human condition, life in general, and the future.
Keith, these are fantastic reasons. I like the way you can clearly map out your intentions and motivations.
I like the way you put "words and worlds" in one space of manipulation, as if language is the world and vice versa. Something for me to think about!
Thank you for your comment!
Glad you enjoyed it!
So strange going back to that part of my life again and trying to sort things out. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an artist. An animator for Walt Disney studios. I was actually pretty good at it, and even enrolled in a correspondence course (think: DRAW WINKY.) And then when I was around 14-15 for some reason I wrote a poem. I had a teacher in 9th grade who read us a story. THE SNOW GOOSE, by Paul Gallico. I'd never had anyone read a story to me before -- my parents were immigrants and English was a second language. I started writing poetry. But they were poems of adventure like GUNGA DIN. I wrote one that was about five pages long that I sent off to the Queen of England. I even got a reply. I was 16. I still have the letter stapled to my wall. December, 1974. And then I read Tennyson's IDYLLS OF THE KING and wanted to write a novel that was a poem.
What I think it was with me, was not so much a compulsion, as it was the creative aspect of it all. I could write adventure stories to entertain myself. I had no idea of where I could send them. I didn't have access to a lot of magazines. The only library I was visiting was the school library. I wrote my poetic novel after I graduated. My parents gave me the year off to come up with something. It was the feeling of bringing characters to life; it was like I was painting pictures with words. I was starting to write stories for my own enjoyment. I came up with my character Jack Of Diamonds when I was around twenty. Forty-five years later, I've brought him to life. I came up with my King Arthur tale at around the same time. I started to write it in duo-tang notebooks left over from high school. I wrote out a table of contents to use as a plot, and am using that same table of contents for the story I've been putting up on my 'stack.
I never thought about sending anything in to publishers at that time. When I tried to send some short stories in, the rejection slips piled up. And then I got married and we had kids, and the writing went on the back burner for a few years. I started writing my magnum opus when I was 28. I know that because that was the age I made my protagonist. I wrote and rewrote that three times. I now call it my apprenticeship.
Now I write novellas mostly, or novelettes. And I suppose I write novels as well. I still write to entertain myself. I enjoy layering my stories with the five senses; I enjoy trying to write from different POVs. I enjoy challenging myself, and while not compelled to write and instead find myself playing on the computer, when I sit down to write, I will write for hours. I suppose when it comes to writing I simply enjoy the escapism it offers me.
Really love the way much of this goes back to school experiences and libraries. I think a lot of what we can discover especially at a young age can help us to find what it is we want to explore and pursue later on. I love all the reasons you write, Ben! Entertaining yourself...well that might be the best one I've heard. :) Thank you!
I love this question. For me, when I write I know a gauge direction I want to move in but when I get my pen and note pad out (yep old school) that mind hand connection happens and It’s very freeing. Bit deep tbf but hey I lie the flow 🤩
Love that, Jon!
I also like to do a lot of pen and paper. I know what you mean, it's both a deep connection and helps to slow me down a little or make it more intentional.
Simply put, writing and reading good fiction is exhilarating. Get the same kind of feeling traveling to a new place, snow skiing on a mountainside, riding motorcycle in shorts and a T-shirt, creating something in the workshop. Hard to beat.
All the metaphors are great, Geoff! Never rode a motorcycle, but I can relate to the others. :)
Thank you!
Thanks Kathleen I'll study these links carefully. Always curious how a serialized novel would work
Hey, I know what I write is fiction, and I know I read is fiction. But that isn’t how it feels.
I’m not saying I don’t know the difference between fiction and reality. It’s not that at all. It’s that I don’t think when we read and write, we experiences such a stark division. Indeed, I think to do leads to us being cut off, closed down from life.
I do think we find the truth in fiction when we read, and so by what seems an inevitability, when I write I can only write the truth. As Elizabeth Bowen put it: ‘The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie.’ So, I do think it useful in the discipline of writing fiction to remember the ‘lie’ component, but only in so far as it serves the truth by providing it with an interesting framework and plot to engage the reader in that truth. It is perfectly possible, I think, to hold the two together in one’s mind as one writes. And I think fiction can allow one to use a truth to tell the lie/fiction (I think fiction is a softer, more generous way of putting it…although I dig Bowen’s rigour) to tell a different, more universal truth to the (perhaps) personal one(s) at the origin of a story. I guess that may be part of what makes translating so fascinating for authors and translators.
And that makes writing really interesting and exciting and alive.
I’m moved by what other writers say about this, because I think all writers think about it. Alan Hollinghurst, one of the most skilful authors in queer literature, talks of the excitement of writing the truth; Garth Greenwell said in a New Yorker piece in 2017 ‘I think literature is the best technology we have for communicating the experience of consciousness, for capturing what thinking feels like.’
I’ve read fiction for years but written it only relatively recently. I can’t for the life of me work out how I survived for so long without writing it (I guess by using words as well as I could to write heaps of other fact stuff for work) I’m not saying it’s all wonderful…it’s hard and exacting. But the possibility of doing it, of writing the truth, is enough to keep me trying.
I think of Kate Atkinson who spoke about the wonder of writing entirely for herself, with no one reading what she wrote but her. I get that, but I also get the other side of that (which she must too in order to publish). There is something mysterious in the act of writing knowing one might be read. I don’t think it is narcissistic or exhibitionist, I don’t think it is didactic, I think it is something far more primitive: a wish to communicate the self to others, to share somehow what thinking feels like. It’s a risk…what if people don’t like what you write? Terrible things have happened throughout time for precisely that reason. But, the urge to use words creatively to tell stories to tell the truth is, Imfeel, irresistible and to try and resist is unhealthy.
Really like this, Nicolas. Fiction is a part of your (very real) life. This riff really speaks to me.
I haven't read Atkinson yet and think I need to remedy this. I see she's on some UK curricula and never really had her on my radar.
I think a lot of what you speak of in relation to her, especially, is implicit in Solenoid, which Nathan Slake and I are doing a post on in a few weeks. Hope you like it! Thanks for the great comment.
Thanks for this great question and your thoughts on it. I can attest to the mental health benefits. A day goes better after writing -- even is it's unusable. The focus, attention, presence, inviting the creative force, listening to the muse - all expand consciousness and calm what the meditators call monkey mind. I can also relate to feeling driven. When I began my clifi novel, it was from a sense of urgency. I had a message that needed to be delivered ASAP. (Eventually learned this is not a recipe for a good novel! haha) Now, I enjoy challenging my imagination by nudging the people in my stories to the edges and centering other beings, like a tree or a stream or heron. I love the idea that nature speaks to us and even has opinions about us, but we've lost the ability to tune in. If we rediscovered how to listen, who knows what might happen next?
Your deep connection with nature through your work and your response are so wonderful, Julie! I think there's a lot of zen-like truths that can be found in this approach.
I also love the point that it's worth it even if it's unusuable. This happens to me all the time, and I've learned that it's just a part of the process. Separately, it's also purposeful just for me it never makes its way toward something else. Thanks so much for this comment.
This reminds me of an interview with Neal Gaiman, about writing every day. He said a ome days go very well and magical things happen. And some days are a slog. But in the final version of the story no one can tell which was which.
Love it! 💯 💫
Kate, I enjoyed reading everyone's responses since I have never written fiction. I love to read fiction but haven't ever felt compelled to write it. Maybe someday but at this point I am more comfortable with essays. Perhaps a question I should ask myself is why I am sticking with what is comfortable?
Thanks for this comment, Matthew. Really good question -- should the writing we do feel comfortable? I don't have a firm answer but it's one to explore. Maybe a different way of putting it would be why does it feel uncomfortable? I occasionally ask myself questions like this. Sometimes I push myself to try something different that feels unnatural. Usually it ends up as a good exercise but better work comes from a space of flow, so to speak.
Just pondering it. :) thanks again.
I am more experienced as an essayist, but I have a couple of published stories and an unpublished novel. Fiction, for me, has a higher standard than nonfiction in the sense that there is no backbone of fact to prop up its legitimacy. I think of it like spinning a yarn to a stranger. A life story demands a certain amount of respect, even if poorly told, because it happened to you. But bad fiction can be dismissed out of hand, because it's not real. Therefore, the bar is higher -- fiction has to cast a more enduring spell, even if many of the narrative tools are interchangeable.
For those reasons I've found it a fiction writing practice more grueling. It's easier to get discouraged, feel like the magic is fading. I know the secret is to take it somewhat less seriously, to embrace the page as a playground. But I also need to feel high stakes for writing to feel worthwhile.
It's interesting that I see beauty as more central to the purpose of fiction than truth. Which is to say that nonfiction often feels like a more didactic form -- a space more conducive to reflection, or at least where scene can be more readily broken by overlays of sense-making. Fiction conveys truth, for sure, but I think it has to do so slantwise. The first order of business is to create something of beauty, a world that one wants to inhabit, a character whose inner struggle is eased now and then by delight. I know that some write fiction for plot, to see what happens or to create the urgent tension that moves toward release. But I don't read fiction written that way. And so my own practice is more devoted to images than to cliffhangers.
Thanks for this personal and varied reflection, Joshua.
Agree, the bar feels higher somehow, or maybe it's that the bar is more elusive? The rubric is difficult to write because the barriers keep shifting and the author can shift or create new barriers oneself.
I agree that even when my researched nonfiction takes me many hours to ensure its thoroughness, it feels somehow safer, surer. The end goal is clearer in my mind, even if it evolves along the way.
Beauty and truth. Hand in hand. Cheers for this comment.
You're right, Joshua. My first book was a memoir, and most things I have written since have been fiction. And the memoir was SO EASY by comparison, simply because I knew what was going to happen next. I knew which side of the road things happened on. I could see the weather. One of the hardest things about fiction is the endless, endless choice.
You’re right there. I could try being ‘clever’ about it, but he was a great ray of light coming out of the blue in his bell-bottom Levi’s and long hair right into my dark suburban disfunction.
Writing is a drug. An expression. A desire. A need. A release.
Towards what, I'm not sure, but I have come to know (relatively late in my life) that it is as important to me as reading.
I write because I have realised that j have to write. I can't articulate more than that right now.
I like the reductive quality of the response. It breathes with intention!
I like all these reasons and feel this is a part of my process as well. It's interesting the way reading came first, which is something several discuss here (Ben W for example).
Thank you, Nathan.
I look forward to delving into everyone's response. ❤️
Also seems I can't type (pesky j, I see you. Whyyyy can't we edit comments in the app???)
We got you. :)