Metaphor by Metaphor

My writing has drawn, out of a reluctant soul, a measure of astonishment at the nature of life.

Writing gives me such enormous pleasure, and I’m a much happier (and therefore nicer) person when I’m doing it. There’s a place in my head that I go to when I write and it’s so rich and unexpected – and scary sometimes – but never ever dull. I first went there when I was seven and I wrote a poem which startled me a bit because it felt like someone else had written it. The adrenaline rush that gave me was incredible and I wanted more. These days, maybe because I can now access that place quite easily, writing feels like something I simply could not live without. It is a joyous thing. I feel very lucky to be paid to do it, but even if I’d never been published, I think I’d still be writing. I love being read, but the person I’m really always writing for is me.

[Form is] an arousing and fulfillment of desire. A work has form insofar as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence.

–Kenneth Burke

I am not a tortured writer. Sometimes the writing does not go well and I can feel frustrated and disappointed with myself. Sometimes I do not feel like writing and sometimes I lose faith in what I’m writing. But I take a pretty robust view about all this because I tend to believe it will become good eventually. I’m not sure I would describe as pleasurable the actual process of writing, even when it’s going well, but when I know in my bones that I’ve written a good book, like The Catastrophist or Havoc, in Its Third Year, I do certainly feel on a high. Good reviews please me, but nothing like as much as meeting readers who tell me they were moved or provoked by one of my books. To enjoy a certain level of public regard, the support of publishers and to be financially rewarded – if this is not a pleasure it’s at least a rare privilege.

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn’t enjoy writing novels I wouldn’t do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calisthenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seductive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn’t faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I’d go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don’t write I’m not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.