April 2006: Turning Inward (cont.)

The truth is—even as we borrow whole from everyone we know to spin our stories—we writers have nothing to create out of but our own substance. Writing, especially writing fiction, is an ultimate act of self involvement, a turning inward while purporting to show the world its own face.

Now that he cannot read my words, does not know that I am writing about him, I write about my son. Yet I know with every word I set down that am writing, not about Peter, but about myself, my pain, my loss. About a season of my life increasingly identified with loss.

In my more assured moments I am certain—and I tell my student writers this—that if we write truly, spinning our words out of our own sinew, we will touch something that others will recognize as theirs. Writing so intimately about ourselves is, strangely enough, the only way our words will ever impact anyone else.

It was the way Truman Capote found himself in the killer that made In Cold Blood historic.

I wonder sometimes, sitting in the carefully manufactured serenity of my study, if I have given up too much of the world to be credible. When John Fowles speaks of crouching “on a ragged carpet” while “the real world rides by,” I cannot help but flinch.

I think I’ll leave my work behind today and go play with baby Chester.