Believe it or not....
Our True Subject is Always Specific
Human life is immense, as Henry James put it, and writing about any aspect of it is therefore a prospect that requires tremendous specificity: you are never writing about what, say, A 34 year old woman with a child and an absent husband might do, but about what this 34 year old woman with a child and an absent husband might do. And you have to make it up about her, the telling little details that give forth her specific nature. It’s the act of making it up that will show you things you didn’t know you knew; you will discover things about this immense life, and the knowledge will come from an otherness, a sense of something more in the lines, which is perfectly natural: The “unexplained knowledge,” as Hemingway says, “which could come from forgotten racial or family experience,” (racial in this sense to mean species-memory). He goes on to say “Who teaches a homing pigeon to fly as he does?” So, again, and I’m aware that I repeat myself: just keep it going, let it play out and try not to over-worry the literary stuff, the sideshows. It’s a story. Something is happening to someone, and it is the writer’s job to make it someone we know. Unfold the trouble or the complication and see where it all takes you, and then go back and try to be very, very shrewd about what happened to you in the process--the lines, sentences, gestures, adumbrations, stops and starts, motions, and what happened to the people you’ve made up, and how all of what they went through felt in the nerve-endings. Say it all as specifically and clearly as you can, with your own temperament, your own lived life. That, to me, is writing as if your life depends on it--not as some intellectual gaming (though there are some wonderful examples of just that in the world’s store of fun reading) but as a revelation, tricked out of the dark—by the very indirection that seems to ignore it—of your real being.
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