Philosophy on the Page

I’m thinking about my fiction class; and how I’ve begun something new— and how chilled the students are when I discourage them from writing what they know. I say fiction is an act of courage and humility, a protest against our mortality, and we, the authors, don’t matter. What matters are our characters, those constructions of imagination that can transcend our biases, agendas and egos.  Trust your powers of invention, I say. Trust the examples of the authors you love to read—and trust that your craft, when braided with compassion, will produce stories that matter both to you and to readers you’ve never met.

Most students accept it. Week by week, their stories are rewarding, and with each revision, and they have to revise— I feel more optimistic, more moved by their work. I’ve long believed that what has kept writers, from fully transcending their personal experiences on the page was fear of incompetence: I can’t write a plot that involves a bank robbery because I’ve never been involved in one, etc. But what if it’s the opposite? What if the reason we find it so difficult to cleave our fiction from our experience, the reason we hesitate or loath to engage our imaginations and let the story rise above the ground floor of truth, isn’t that we’re afraid we’ll do the job poorly, but that we’re afraid we’ll do it too well? If we succeed, if the characters are fully imagined, if they are so beautifully real that they quicken and rise off the page, then maybe our own experiences will feel smaller, 
our actions less consequential. Maybe we’re afraid that if we write what we don’t know, we’ll discover something truer than anything our real lives will ever yield. And maybe we encounter still another, more insidious threat—the threat that if we do our jobs too well, if we powerfully render characters who are unbound from our experience, they’ll supplant us in the reader’s mind. Maybe we worry that fiction’s vividness will put our own brief lives in a meaningless state, and the reader, seduced by literature’s permanence, will leave us behind. Maybe we feel threatened that if our characters outlive us—there is the possibility that the writer, not the reader, will be forgotten. 


What do you say to that dear reader/ writer?