Caleb Fox

Why do you write (or read) fiction? Why do I? Here are some long-ago words of Richard Wright on the subject:

“That was the deep fun of the job: to feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perception, making new and -- until that very split second of time! -- unheard-of and unfelt effects with words. It had a buoying and tonic impact upon me; my senses would strain to seek for more and more of such relationships; my temperature would rise as I worked. That is writing as I feel it, a kind of significant living.”

I once heard Lawrence Durrell address the same subject. During the years he was writing THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET, he said, he and his friends never thought of writing as a career. “We thought of it as a windscreen to better living.”

John Fowles, best known for his FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN, commented that people write novels to express what it feels like to be human beings and walk the world in their time.

Somewhere in the vicinity of these comments lies my own truth. Writing fiction is not entertainment, though having some sport along the way is a good idea. Nor is it primarily imparting a lesson, a job for teachers with hickory sticks. Nor yet is it understanding your own life, at least not if “understanding” is meant in an intellectual way. It is rummaging through your experience, tasting and savoring it more fully, laving yourself in all the wonders and terrors of being in this world—and capturing those feelings in words that enable writers and readers to have Eureka moments—“Yes, that IS what it is. In the ground of my being this is how I experience life itself.”

We could just settle for Wright's perfect phrase, “the deep fun of the job.”

Yesterday morning came the male rain. That’s what our hundreds of Navajo neighbors call it. It’s a hard rain blasted at us by thunder and lightning. It pounds the earth and gouges out gullies. A couple of hours of it can make deep zigzags in the yard. Sometimes hail rat-a-tats on the roof.

Later that day came the female rain, a soft, gentle moisture that strokes the soil and the plants.

As the Navajos see it, we need both forms of rain, one for insemination, one for growing.

I started that day in the doldrums. I’d had some days of frustration with wanting to start writing (this will be the third title in my fantasy Spirit Flight series), and feeling a little off. When the male rains came, I drew the cool, moist air into my lungs and suddenly thought, I can write. NOW, I said to myself. GO!

The afternoon brought me five new-born pages. Are they terrific? Doesn’t matter. They are the first cells of what will one day feel to me like a living being. As I wrote, the female rains drifted down.

I remarked to myself, later, that the writer in me is able somehow to heal the man. He can change woes to joy, frustration to fun.

How odd. Who are these two people who live inside me, and which of them is real? Though the stories sometimes seem to come from some power outside, they probably don’t. They come from the guy who knows how to make contact with creative energy and by doing that, incidentally, saves my life. Wonderfully, the person I need most lives inside me.

He's always there, but sometimes silent. How to get him to come forth? For me one way is a moment of opening to the earth--a short walk, a moment standing in rain, or watching winds whip the clouds. The quickest way, though, is just to begin writing. Before long my partner joins in the fun.

I want to spend all my days with that creator fellow. Bye bye, sad guy.

So I'll write every day. Play music every day. Keep my friend close.

Where do your stories come from?

Travelers on the way to Athens had to submit to being placed on Procrustes’ bed. If too short, you were stretched out. If too long, you got hacked down to size. Otherwise no Athens.

That’s how cultures cut citizens to fit their ideals. The fortunate fit naturally, but most people suffer.

Our culture loves the outgoing, self-confident man, the quarterback or colonel. Most artists don’t match—they’re too emotional, too dreamy, too flamboyant, too this or too that. Artists are different, and this society does not love differences.

There’s the choice: Conform and succeed, or be guided by your inner compass, and...?
Tough choice.

Some writers try to escape it by putting on one face in public, another in private. When we walk that road, we live lives of pretense and self-betrayal. We constantly deny our own truths to others. If we play this game, our lives are a lie and a self-betrayal.

For any writer, including those of us who write fantasy, the dilemma is painful. You can be a hack, punching out words in hope of dollars and fame. Or you can shape your stories to your own sense of what is beautiful, and thus expose your real self to the world.

That takes courage. I salute every artist who does it.

--Caleb Fox