{"id":119156,"date":"2017-12-12T09:00:02","date_gmt":"2017-12-12T14:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=119156"},"modified":"2017-12-11T14:32:24","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T19:32:24","slug":"write-fiction-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/12\/write-fiction-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Write Fiction in 2017?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Constantin Alajalov, cover for The Saturday Evening Post, February 12, 1949<\/em><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Most nights, before I go to bed, I sneak into the room where my infant son sleeps, steal across the floor, and kill the wireless router. The plug pulls away from the wall with a soft, satisfying sound, and on the plastic box a row of twinkling green lights blinks out.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned I have to do this. Otherwise, in the morning, I\u2019ll succumb to temptation: I\u2019ll rise, open my laptop, and start reading the news. I know that that decision will feel innocuous, even necessary, in the moment. But I also know I want to spend my morning writing as much as I can\u2014and that a working Wi-Fi signal has the power to derail me. Even fifteen minutes of headline-scanning Twitter\u2014if I can limit it to that\u2014leaves me feeling overloaded, angry, panicked, worn out, weirdly high. So instead of flooding my mind with other voices, I back away. My work begins then with an act of disconnection, this physical severing I perform each night before I go to sleep.<\/p>\n

As much as we carp about the increasing digitization of our lives, this isn\u2019t really a new problem. Writing required cord-cutting long before the computer. It\u2019s an act of refusal, of relinquishment, and of retreat, a decision to turn away from the world and its noise of possibilities, to chase instead a signal down the quiet of a page. That work\u2014the deep, sustained kind that yields poems and essays and fiction\u2014can only happen in solitude, and in silence.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the trouble.<\/p>\n

Over the past year, on Twitter and in private conversations, I\u2019ve heard writers express doubt about the literary impulse, the backing away that it requires. Even if you don\u2019t write, you\u2019ve probably felt it, too. The need to be present, vocal, and accounted for as citizens is especially obvious in 2017. The moment demands constant vigilance and participation\u2014and the idea of turning inward, even briefly, can feel shameful.<\/p>\n

Not that anyone has lost faith in literature itself\u2014far from it. In times of crisis especially, finished books demonstrate an extraordinary ability to console, challenge, and guide us. But I\u2019ve watched writers grow queasier about process<\/em>. There\u2019s no guarantee our works in progress\u2014those hopeful, half-formed things still struggling into being\u2014will ever be worth the time we steal to write them.<\/p>\n

This tension\u2014between private work and public duty, between art and life itself\u2014has been a source of anxiety and fascination for me over the past five years, which I\u2019ve spent interviewing writers. The overt goal of By Heart<\/a>, my ongoing column for The Atlantic<\/em>\u2014now collected alongside new pieces in Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process<\/em><\/a>\u2014<\/em>is for authors to discuss a favorite passage from literature, explaining how its impact transformed them. But I push writers to go even deeper in each piece, too. Why<\/em> do they write? I want to know. And how do they justify the time and solitude it takes? Now, more than\u00a0a hundred and fifty\u00a0interviews later, I think I\u2019ve edged closer to some answers.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s only one honest place to start, and that is this: writing begins with an impulse that is beyond justification. Khaled Hosseini admits it\u2019s a \u201ccompulsion.\u201d Mark Haddon calls it \u201ca borderline pathological obsession, something I have to do regularly to feel human.\u201d In general, the authors I talk to seem to agree: Writing is not something people do because they looked at the world dispassionately and decided literature is what we needed more of. It\u2019s an urge, above all else, something as primal as hunger or lust, more covenant than choice. Which means, for most, the hardship of writing is simply preferable to the misery of not writing. As Kathryn Harrison put it: \u201cI love writing, and I\u2019m miserable without it\u2014and as time goes by, the people around me are miserable also.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, the fact that literary production stems from a kind of primal hunger doesn\u2019t quite dispel our lingering guilt: the act itself can feel like abdication. When we\u2019re writing, after all, there\u2019s so much we\u2019re not<\/em> doing. We\u2019re not paying attention to friends, to family, to the news\u2014our phones are off, our cords are cut. It\u2019s hard to ditch the queasy feeling that the creative retreat is an escapist privilege.<\/p>\n

In a recent By the Book entry<\/a> in the New York Times Book Review<\/em>, Andy Weir likened writing to a joyful diversion, one that\u2019s best left unvexed by political and ethical perturbations. He takes the writer\u2019s disconnected posture to the extreme\u2014suggesting his art should be produced and read in a hermetically sealed safe space, free from external concerns.<\/p>\n

\u201cI tend to avoid fiction that\u2019s too dark or serious or has a political message. For me, fiction is a form of escapism. I want to leave the real world, not sit around and stress about it,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Weir, in his way, has a point: writers don\u2019t necessarily owe the world anything except work that can be enjoyed by others. But it\u2019s hard to get behind this hard-line brand of escapism when you read the rest of Weir\u2019s piece, which he used\u2014as literary Twitter quickly pointed out<\/a>\u2014to exclusively celebrate the work of other famous white dudes. Weir\u2019s an unwitting and dramatic example of a famous slippery slope: the worship of art for art\u2019s sake can become a refusal to reckon with our own complicity in a flawed status quo.<\/p>\n

But most of the writers I talk to desire not to escape the world but to enlarge<\/em> it, by extending the possibilities of language. I think Amy Tan put it best: \u201cThe feeling I\u2019m talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are,\u201d she told me. \u201cWhen I was six or seven, I used to read a thesaurus searching for the words that meant exactly what I felt. And I could never find them \u2026 When I had a feeling like sadness, I couldn\u2019t find a word that meant everything that I felt inside of me. I always felt that words were inadequate, that I\u2019d never been able to express myself\u2014ever. Even now, it\u2019s so hard to express what I think and feel, the totality of what I\u2019ve seen. But this loneliness is the impetus for writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words: articulating these universal experiences is a way of combatting existential loneliness, for both the writer and the reader. Anyone who\u2019s truly loved a book knows how it can shrink the numbing distance between us. But it\u2019s more than that. The attempt to speak where there\u2019d been silence, or name a thing that had no name, is inherently political\u2014is revolutionary\u2014because, in very real ways, it expands boundaries: first of what can be said, and then of what can be done, and finally of what is possible.<\/p>\n

Writing transforms us internally as well. I\u2019ve heard so many writers describe their process as a delicate balancing act, a way to link the conscious, daytime self to the twilight world of the subconscious. I think that\u2019s why Andre Dubus III, Richard Bausch, Celeste Ng, Hannah Tinti, Ben Marcus, and Eileen Myles\u2014to name a few\u2014described their work to me using the language of dreams. As in dreams, writing feels like an experience where we are not fully in control. And, like dreams, writing has a way of cracking open what has become brittle with certainty. From the fissure flows ideas and identities that are pliable, fluid, deep.<\/p>\n

That experience is what allows someone like Roxane Gay\u2014under the influence of Zadie Smith\u2019s NW\u2014<\/em>to describe writing as a form of drag, a way to assume varied and contradictory postures, acknowledging if not quite reconciling the many voices we contain within us.<\/p>\n

\u201cFiction can allow us brief residence in the land of true ambiguity, where we really don\u2019t know what the hell to think,\u201d George Saunders told me. \u201cWe can\u2019t stay there very long. It’s not in our nature. You can be truly confused by something and then ten minutes later you\u2019re grasping for your opinions like somebody going for a life jacket. But that brief exposure to the land of ambiguity is really, really good for us. To be genuinely confused about something for even a few seconds is good because it opens us up to the idea that what we know right now is not complete.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fundamentalism, evangelism, and moral absolutism have led human beings to trouble in all eras, and in ours, but the act of writing tends to remind us of the muddledness of things. The act of writing restores our admiration for the complexity and mystery we call beauty. We are creatures who harden into habit, into dogma, and yet something about this process encourages us to remember how to be surprised.<\/p>\n

We are at the dawn of the Anthropocene, a man-made era in which humanity\u2019s appetites are transforming\u2014when they\u2019re not all-out ravaging\u2014the world. Our overconsumption, our collective hunger, is literally being written into the landscape, and into the sea and sky, in increasingly alarming ways. But literature is a way to opt out, if only briefly. The writing person, like the reading person, consumes almost nothing. It\u2019s a way to temporarily drop our ties to troubling, depleting systems of production. A person who writes longhand in a notebook, as many writers tell me they do, is not making corporations stronger by shopping, or viewing advertisements, or using social media. They\u2019re not even burning fossil fuels. This ability to render oneself essentially harmless\u2014even for an hour\u2014is rare, and radical, in our tangled age.<\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s part of what\u2019s hard about writing, too. Unthinkable amounts of money are spent every day to engage the part of us that unceasingly wants<\/em>\u2014wants not just food and shelter, sex and security, power and status, but information, novelty, and connectedness. We are assailed at all turns by cravings; we are pulled in every direction by our desires. As twenty-first-century first-world humans, our first act in the morning is to check our phones\u2014the nineteenth-century word we use to familiarize the glowing portals we carry with us, windowpanes we caress until they show us what we want. But writing, by necessity, means saying no to all of that. It\u2019s an activity that must<\/em> be monotasked\u2014there is no other way to do it. And so it reminds us how it felt to do only one<\/em> thing.<\/p>\n

I think of the angels of the Paradiso<\/em>, who when asked by Dante for the secret of their happiness, say: \u201cWe long for what we have.\u201d Writing is a commitment to longing for what you have\u2014an hour to kill, the pen, the paper, the mind\u2019s low whirr\u2014and no more. Stephen King once said, \u201cWhen you write, don\u2019t do anything but go to the bathroom.\u201d<\/p>\n

The essayist Melissa Febos told me that she tries to approaches everything she does with the same determined single-mindedness she practices in order to write. She urges us to consolidate the energy we might spend distractedly wanting or worrying and instead \u201crelocate it, use it on some task that we really believe in,\u201d she told me. \u201cOn our artwork, on our activism, on our parenting, on loving people as fully as we can. Oh my God, we should all hope for such economy of energy. We could do so much. We could solve so much.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are many reasons to write, but only one way to do so: single-mindedly, with complete focus on the task at hand. If our work accomplishes nothing else, that rigorous mode of attention serves as a kind of training, a boot camp for the soul. When you rise from your desk again, the day\u2019s work done, remember how it felt to give yourself fully. As you love the people you care for, as you fight for the world you want\u2014remember. You can do those things, too, with the whole self. Don\u2019t settle for anything else.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Joe<\/span> Fassler is a writer, editor, and musician based in New York. Since 2013, he\u2019s asked writers about their creative lives for The Atlantic\u2019s <\/em>By Heart<\/a>\u00a0series, now collected with new essays in <\/em>Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Most nights, before I go to bed, I sneak into the room where my infant son sleeps, steal across the floor, and kill the wireless router. The plug pulls away from the wall with a soft, satisfying sound, and on the plastic box a row of twinkling green lights blinks out. 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