The young fiction writer--you--carries a burden of sorts. You are lugging something around that seems to be part of your being, or as we would say now, is "hard wired" into you, so much so that you have become its container, but the only way to express it--almost literally, to bring it out--is to write it. What "it" is, in this case, is a piling up of selves, of beings, and of stories that are being experienced from the inside. What is it like to be you, to be me? You can't answer that question by answering it discursively. You can only answer it by telling a story. That's not therapy. You're not sick. You're just a certain kind of human being. It's exaclty like the necessity the musician has in humming a tune or playing a piano, or the necessity an artist has in doodling and sketching and drawing and painting. It's almost involuntary. Something needs to get out: Not expressed but extruded. As the composer Camille Saint-Saens remarked, "I write music the way an apple tree produces apples."
--Charles Baxter from Letters to a Fiction Writer
No comments:
Post a Comment