The Fiction Just Beyond Us

For as many stunning novels as we have to read, there exist as many fervent excuses not to write one, and I’ve heard a great swath of them. A boy I went on a date with my first winter in New York City, who was so intelligent that sometimes he stuttered to choose precisely the right series of words to describe a thought or feeling, a boy who had published in all sorts of top-shelf papers and magazines, told me he could never write a novel. We were crossing through Prospect Park during a snowstorm, and I was twenty-two, a Californian in the wrong shoes, and we were on the subject because my first novel was out with editors, looking for its home. Why not, I said, probably too bluntly, as though he had just told me could not bring himself to floss. His blush was apparent between his hat and scarf. Really, I said, more gently this time. We were under the arc of one of Olmsted’s limestone tunnels, the violent weather beyond us for a moment. I could never, he said, his eyes bluer with anxiety, choose the characters’ names.

I laughed then, but I wouldn’t now, understanding that paralysis, when it comes to the conception of a fictive universe, appears in all forms and manners. An acquaintance once told me she could not write a novel because she always felt the pressure of the next page as she struggled with the one in front of her; another that he imagined anyone reading what he wrote as a kind of robbery—a piece of himself gone and reappropriated by the opinions of others.

When I think of creative immobility, how to counsel those who want to write but can’t, a certain image always comes to me. In the town where I grew up, which once exported the majority of the country’s eggs, I often walked the remains of the railroad that traced the river beneath it. More vigilant parents might have forbade this, but mine were of the feeling that in a fall or a bruise would come a lesson. Though the metal tracks were intact, the wooden platform beneath them was damaged in every conceivable fashion: by flooding; by rot; by whichever heavy loads had fallen onto them some sixty years before, as the route made its sudden bend. There were as many holes as there were rumors of children who had hurt themselves punching a leg through one, but I wanted very badly to feel myself graceful on those thin metal lines, and so I resolved to look only at them. As long as I held my chin at ninety degrees, focused on the stretch I would reach with a bit more work, I could keep my balance. It was when I looked down, surveyed all possible holes, all potential injuries, the teenage graffiti on the docks below, that I lost my footing. This analogy is not fresh or original precisely because of its familiar truth: So long as we don’t lose ourselves in the threats of the periphery, so long as we resolve to focus on the methods that best suit the task at hand—our alignment, our focus, our initial want and the power it can retain—we are less likely to fall off track.

Because I was a dreamy kid, often left to her own devices, I spent obsessive hours there one summer, in the heat the metal refracted, convinced I would end up somewhere totally unlike where I had begun. I understood there were mountains on the outskirts of town, swimming holes, and, not so far away, San Francisco, but I kept telling myself the destination was not for me to know. My only business was the feet in my shoes—off-brand high-tops, tightly laced—and all the parts of my body, the calves and arms and eyelashes, which were mine, which would never belong to anyone else.