My mother used to take me on errands when I was 9, 10 years old. There we’d be, in line at the bank, bored, and she’d point to someone and say, “Tell me about that man. What’s his name?” It was my favorite game with her. “What does he do for a living?” Turns out I was very good at it. “Is he married? What’s his wife like? Does he have kids?” And I would go on and on, deepening my portrayal of his life, wife, kids, problems. She taught me there was a whole world inside every person, no matter how “average” they seemed to be. Every person was a story to be discovered.
And I’m still answering those questions.
When I got a bit older, I had the realization that when I grew up, I was going to be stuck being just one person. One story, one life—I am so-and-so, born to so-and-so, raised here and there, believe this and that. It seemed so small, so limiting. But writing gives me the chance to be all kinds of people, walk around in their lives. To be the many, to live out my variations, poke into my contradictions.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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Also, I want life to make sense in a way it just doesn’t. That’s the problem with life—it’s a shaggy-dog story. One damn thing after another. And then and then and then. Things happen, people leave, then somebody hits your car, then you win a prize, then you choke on a sandwich. Just a random series of events. Life makes no sense; it has no point. You’re born, you die. It’s so unfair. I can’t stand that. If I were a religious person, maybe I would posit that “God knows why.” Instead, I write.
In writing, I can take that chaos and shape it, so that it reveals something about the human experience, so that some kind of meaning emerges. I’ll write a character’s story to provide some kind of justice in the world, or if none appears, then I can elevate that tragedy. I want our struggles to mean something. I want to show how sometimes just making it through the day is heroic. I want characters who struggle for some kind of dignity or justice or truth or sense to their lives, and if one of those characters fails and is crushed—then at least the reader will witness that loss and be moved by it, be changed by it. Art makes life mean something, makes it matter.
The best thing about writing, for me, is that it’s not entirely intentional. When I start, I have no idea where a story is going to take me. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with no helpful picture on the lid. I have to go on feel: Is this true? Is this what the character would do? Is it too easy? I let the work surprise me. I never get tired of that process. Writing is moment-by-moment improvisation. I would be bored to tears if I had to plot it out, if I knew what was coming. I love writing because it’s like Harold and the Purple Crayon—you’re drawing the road you’re on and the car you’re driving in as you go along. There is nothing until you start writing. As my writing teacher, the novelist Kate Braverman, used to say, “you dance with the page, and it dances with you.” The feeling of the page dancing with you is something I live for. Otherwise, it’s just playing with paper dolls.
I love that writing has no upper limit to how good it can be. You never “get there.” I’m always that kid in line at the bank, making up a story for my mom. With each new book, I’m a beginner all over again. Whatever I learned on the last book is of no use on the next one. I adore that. Writing is like building a house where you have to craft new tools before you even start building. It uses everything I’ve got, and resources I didn’t even know I had. That’s what keeps me coming back—it’s always fresh, always new, always that dance.•
