Maps

Writing is a wild thing, for me. It's independent of me, a black-and-white jungle. Non-fiction interests me, but fiction intrigues me. Non-fiction can be creative, can be structurally unusual, but it is constrained, for the most part, by something we call the truth. Invention must be acknowledged, imagination is tongue-in-cheek*. But fiction is different. While the goal--imparting truth--is the same, the means of coming to it are as different as a lizard and a kangaroo in a sports coat. Non-fiction is crawling through the dense jungle seeking the light which means escape. Fiction is seeking the light by making the jungle more dense. Fiction is the piling on of untruths to get to the truth. Fiction is like being trapped in an oubliette; to escape we must build a ladder of shit.

I've always been a fan of the Modernists, for whom Truth, if it exists, can never be arrived at using language. There is no direct route with words. The road does not cease so much as fall off, like that illustration on the cover of Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends. So to inform you of their inability to inform you, the Modernists write, after declaring that writing is useless. This notion is oxymoronical. This notion is a cold-rain headache.

When I think about it, I feel lost. But if you wanted to know what I really meant by that, I'd have to tell you something completely different. Fiction writing is not saying, "I feel lost, and this is why," but "I feel unfound, and this is why not."

*Whatever that means.