Caleb Fox

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.

Can you think of times the movie was better than the book? We usually (especially writers)say the opposite. But aren't movies sometimes better than the books they're based on? Here are some cases where I liked the movie better. I invite you to send me your own lists, or your objections to mine:


THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR (based on Irving's A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR)
THE GRADUATE
THE GODFATHER
THE WIZARD OF OZ (though both were terrific)
and maybe even ATONEMENT

--caleb

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.”