ever happens. The only obstacles are that someone might rebuff someone else or someone might get sick or grow old, and even these are usually hypothetical obstacles. People get educations, travel, buy paintings, go on diplomatic missions, but the events are for the most part meetings between various people (or simply sightings of one person by another, sometimes thanks to a stroll or a ride in a carriage) and what these meetings bring out, on a psychological level, about life itself. How can a work be considered fiction when there’s no plot? Philosophy, perhaps, or criticism, but not fiction.
Carpenters restore old homes to their architectural and design period, not knowing the original color of the walls. If restoring a home is like writing a nonfiction narrative, and if choosing the paint for one wall is like imagining one moment in the larger story, shouldn’t we acknowledge that the house and its walls were in fact never one particular way? On a single wall, sometimes wallpaper hung, sometimes paintings stared, sometimes children penned their names, sometimes flies sat, sometimes dust settled, sometimes sunlight blazed, sometimes fingerprints shimmered. The lost story the carpenter tries to restore isn’t one particular story, but a pool of possible tales, with different perspectives from different characters, told at different times for different reasons. The nonfiction writer who works to revive a lost scene adds one similar story to the collectionof stories that ever existed for that moment. The entire platform of my imagination—my purpose, my hope, my intent—is different from that of a fiction writer’s. I don’t seek to tell the best story. I seek to tell a story that once was. I seek to fill a place that once had meaning with meaning again.
blur
I think of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and all forms of storytelling as existing on a rather wide continuum, at one end fantasy (J. R. R. Tolkien and the like) and at the other end an extremely literal-minded register of a life, such as a guy in eastern Washington—named, as fate would have it, Shields—who (until his recent death) had kept the longest or longest-running diary, endless accounts of everything he did all day. And in between at various tiny increments are greater and lesser imaginative projects. An awful lot of fiction is immensely autobiographical, and a lot of nonfiction is highly imagined. We dream ourselves awake every minute of the day. “Fiction”/“nonfiction” is an utterly useless distinction.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Genre mingling is responsible in no small measure for the moral debility of intellect and character and will.
These categories are plastic.
But they aren’t.
Ah, but they are.
I like to write stuff that’s only an inch from life, from what really happened, but all the art is of course in that inch. My books tend not to have the narrative and story you associate with fiction, but at the same time they are arranged and structured, to put it somewhat pompously, as works of art rather than accumulations of information. To that extent, I like to think they’re more novel than many novels.
David Foster Wallace’s
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
and
Consider the Lobster
. Leonard Michaels’s
Shuffle
. Simon Gray’s four-volume
Smoking Diaries
, which dwarf his plays. Albert Goldbarth’s
Great Topics of the World
. The prologue to
Slaughterhouse-Five
is the best thing Vonnegut ever wrote. Jean Stafford’s
A Mother in History
. Samuel Delany’s
The Motion of Light in Water
. Rebecca West’s
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
.
The grist of the material is factual—a narrative with people whose names you can look up in the phone book or who have historically verifiable existences—but it’s fiction in the sense that it’s heavily patterned and plotted; it’s structured like a novel.
I’m interested in the generic edge, the boundary between what are roughly called
Carpenters restore old homes to their architectural and design period, not knowing the original color of the walls. If restoring a home is like writing a nonfiction narrative, and if choosing the paint for one wall is like imagining one moment in the larger story, shouldn’t we acknowledge that the house and its walls were in fact never one particular way? On a single wall, sometimes wallpaper hung, sometimes paintings stared, sometimes children penned their names, sometimes flies sat, sometimes dust settled, sometimes sunlight blazed, sometimes fingerprints shimmered. The lost story the carpenter tries to restore isn’t one particular story, but a pool of possible tales, with different perspectives from different characters, told at different times for different reasons. The nonfiction writer who works to revive a lost scene adds one similar story to the collectionof stories that ever existed for that moment. The entire platform of my imagination—my purpose, my hope, my intent—is different from that of a fiction writer’s. I don’t seek to tell the best story. I seek to tell a story that once was. I seek to fill a place that once had meaning with meaning again.
blur
I think of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and all forms of storytelling as existing on a rather wide continuum, at one end fantasy (J. R. R. Tolkien and the like) and at the other end an extremely literal-minded register of a life, such as a guy in eastern Washington—named, as fate would have it, Shields—who (until his recent death) had kept the longest or longest-running diary, endless accounts of everything he did all day. And in between at various tiny increments are greater and lesser imaginative projects. An awful lot of fiction is immensely autobiographical, and a lot of nonfiction is highly imagined. We dream ourselves awake every minute of the day. “Fiction”/“nonfiction” is an utterly useless distinction.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Genre mingling is responsible in no small measure for the moral debility of intellect and character and will.
These categories are plastic.
But they aren’t.
Ah, but they are.
I like to write stuff that’s only an inch from life, from what really happened, but all the art is of course in that inch. My books tend not to have the narrative and story you associate with fiction, but at the same time they are arranged and structured, to put it somewhat pompously, as works of art rather than accumulations of information. To that extent, I like to think they’re more novel than many novels.
David Foster Wallace’s
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
and
Consider the Lobster
. Leonard Michaels’s
Shuffle
. Simon Gray’s four-volume
Smoking Diaries
, which dwarf his plays. Albert Goldbarth’s
Great Topics of the World
. The prologue to
Slaughterhouse-Five
is the best thing Vonnegut ever wrote. Jean Stafford’s
A Mother in History
. Samuel Delany’s
The Motion of Light in Water
. Rebecca West’s
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
.
The grist of the material is factual—a narrative with people whose names you can look up in the phone book or who have historically verifiable existences—but it’s fiction in the sense that it’s heavily patterned and plotted; it’s structured like a novel.
I’m interested in the generic edge, the boundary between what are roughly called
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