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.”
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