Caleb Fox

I’m often asked, “Do you write novels to teach or entertain?”

The short answer is neither. A good way to explain is through an ancient Buddhist story:

A samurai, reaching forty, decided to devote the rest of his life to spiritual matters. After a difficult journey of many miles through every kind of weather, he came to a famous monastery and asked to see the sensei.

“The sensei allows each seeker to ask one question,” he was told.

When his opportunity came, the samurai asked, “Tell me, sensei, what is heaven and what is hell?”

The sensei said, “A brutish oaf like you has no right to ask such a question.”

Furious at the insult, the samurai drew his sword, cocked it, and was about to lop off a head.

The sensei held up a finger and said, “THAT is hell.”
The samurai stilled his arm and noticed what was going on inside him, tumult and rage. Yes, that was hell. An extraordinary lesson.

Then he realized, This man risked his life to teach me something. A tear of gratitude rolled down the samurai’s cheek.

The samurai held up his finger again and said, “And THAT is heaven.’

This is a superb diagram of what fiction does. Instead of offering messages or diversions, it gives readers experiences. Experiences don’t address the intellect alone--the sensei didn’t offer a lecture about how heaven and hell are inner states of this world, not the next one. Instead they engage the imagination, the emotions, even the body and bring awareness not to the mind but to the whole man. Just as a good novel does. Goose bumps. Startled jumps. Tears.

That’s why the answer to the question is neither. Maybe one day people will stop asking. After all, neither writers or readers need an explanation of what’s happening in novels. They simply know, by experience, that it’s good.

Bravo.

A celebrated editor once reprimanded me, "A middle-aged man can't write a scene from the point of view of a ten-year-old Indian girl." Even though he was speaking conventional wisdom (and didn’t know I was below middle age and am of mixed blood), he was dead wrong. This is one convention I defy. Join me.

I write my novels from within the minds of several characters, including the "villain." (Tricky technically, but...) My immediate reason is the truth of the story: Each character is a universe within, each has a distinctive way of seeing the world, which explains why he acts the way he does. Showing a range of points of view conveys the truth of the story. This is what novelists do.

But there's a larger reason for delving into other people's minds, for me a beacon not only of writing but living. Human beings are of infinite variety, and not just the obvious ones. Whether you’re a woman, man, or child, Asian or Anglo, Hispanic or black, you have an amazing landscape behind your eyes. Through fiction, and almost only through fiction, the rest of us can step into such landscapes, look around and be fascinated, and then look out at the world through foreign eyes and be absolutely dazzled. SO THIS IS WHY SHE ACTS THE WAY SHE DOES.

What could be more important? What greater gift could stories give this fractionalized world? An older history prof, speaking of my story about Crazy Horse, paid me a great compliment: “From now on I will never see people of color in the same way.”

The object of writing, as of reading, is to sail into the new. If you're a white guy, make a point of writing from inside women's minds. If you're black, write from inside the head of an Irish back-room politican. If you're a Latina woman, step inside the mind of a Hindu convenience store owner. For here lies discovery. In this land there be wonders. Here opens your own growth, and here is the gift you can offer the world.

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.”

WHY FICTION?

People often tell me, with a note of pride, "I only read non-fiction." I wish the tone was sadness and disappointment.

Information about the world is useful. It allows us to drive where we want to go, shop intelligently, find treatment for our ailments, and a billion of other handy things. Yet it's mostly about the outer world. Even a memoir is limited to what is or was, rather than what we can dream.

A well-done novel is a dazzling dream. John Fowles (THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN) wrote that a novel is a way of telling others how it feels to be a human being and walk the earth in your time. It is, and that's a lot. Notice that Fowles speaks of revealing a world that is ultimately inner, the writer’s most fundamental feelings about himself and the world.

But a novel is even more--an act of imagination, preferably as audacious as possible. It is a grand flourish of creative play. The great reward it offers readers, on the highest level, is the joy of mental frolicking and cavorting. It is to non-fiction what dance is to walking.

Also, a novel shows, with amazing intimacy, an inner world. 'This is what I think is fun. This is what I fear. This is what I love.' No compilation of facts, whether a medical chart in the doctor’s office or a profile in the NEW YORK TIMES, could be so revealing, or make the reader EXPERIENCE another human being's mind and life.

If Johnny reads only non-fiction, he will be a very dull boy.

--Caleb Fox