I LEARNED EARLY ON THAT...
AT THE HEART OF EVERY STORY there is a candid fact or two. A body lies on a street. It can be measured and weighed and checked for scars, the purse or wallet can provide the facts of identity: a name, an address, an age, the bank, the number of the driver's license. Wives and husbands and lovers will speak about the dead and add a few more small facts about the person's life and death. But the best detectives also know that the facts don't always reveal the truth, certainly about an entity as complicated as we human beings. The facts don't reveal the record of the dead person's final thoughts, dreams, desires, confusions or ambiguities. They are unable to reveal or explain the meaning of that life. Things, as the philosopher said, ain't always what they seem to be. Nor are people.
A writer can prepare well, listen carefully, and, thanks to modern technology, record what they hear with absolute fidelity. But human beings lie. Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Actors lie. Victims lie. That is why many writers turn to writing fiction; to get at the truth beyond the facts, about themselves and others. If a writer sticks around long enough, if they see enough human beings in trouble, they learn that the guilty are sometimes innocent and the innocent probably have an angle.
In fiction as well as non-fiction, the trick is to see the world as a skeptic, not a cynic, while allowing for the feeble possibility of human decency to somehow seep in; and every writer learns quickly that for one kind of story, simple declarative sentences, as blunt as axes, are best; for others, it is necessary to use longer lines, more complicated rhythms and that the style itself is a form of comment or explanation.
By now, you may be asking yourself, "Why is he writing this?" And the answer is quite simple: "To attempt to understand why I keep on hearing the music of the written word." In a way, everything I have ever put down on paper make up a kind of public diary, a record of where I was and what I saw and who I met along the way.
In a meandering and sometimes unplanned way, they're about one man grappling with the meaning of the public events of his time: humorous events and betrayals, large triumphs and small stupidities; along with the Civil Rights marches of youth and baseball of even younger days, of being informed by the writings of Faulkner and Twain and the music of jazz and of the blues and gaining knowledge of the history of ancient Egypt and of the Mongols along the way; all done in order to gain and embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway once said should be present in all good writing: "the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."
AT THE HEART OF EVERY STORY there is a candid fact or two. A body lies on a street. It can be measured and weighed and checked for scars, the purse or wallet can provide the facts of identity: a name, an address, an age, the bank, the number of the driver's license. Wives and husbands and lovers will speak about the dead and add a few more small facts about the person's life and death. But the best detectives also know that the facts don't always reveal the truth, certainly about an entity as complicated as we human beings. The facts don't reveal the record of the dead person's final thoughts, dreams, desires, confusions or ambiguities. They are unable to reveal or explain the meaning of that life. Things, as the philosopher said, ain't always what they seem to be. Nor are people.
A writer can prepare well, listen carefully, and, thanks to modern technology, record what they hear with absolute fidelity. But human beings lie. Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Actors lie. Victims lie. That is why many writers turn to writing fiction; to get at the truth beyond the facts, about themselves and others. If a writer sticks around long enough, if they see enough human beings in trouble, they learn that the guilty are sometimes innocent and the innocent probably have an angle.
In fiction as well as non-fiction, the trick is to see the world as a skeptic, not a cynic, while allowing for the feeble possibility of human decency to somehow seep in; and every writer learns quickly that for one kind of story, simple declarative sentences, as blunt as axes, are best; for others, it is necessary to use longer lines, more complicated rhythms and that the style itself is a form of comment or explanation.
By now, you may be asking yourself, "Why is he writing this?" And the answer is quite simple: "To attempt to understand why I keep on hearing the music of the written word." In a way, everything I have ever put down on paper make up a kind of public diary, a record of where I was and what I saw and who I met along the way.
In a meandering and sometimes unplanned way, they're about one man grappling with the meaning of the public events of his time: humorous events and betrayals, large triumphs and small stupidities; along with the Civil Rights marches of youth and baseball of even younger days, of being informed by the writings of Faulkner and Twain and the music of jazz and of the blues and gaining knowledge of the history of ancient Egypt and of the Mongols along the way; all done in order to gain and embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway once said should be present in all good writing: "the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."
No comments:
Post a Comment