Whether it writes itself, or has to be scraped out of the inside of your skull with a serrated grapefruit spoon, whether squeezed from the very bottom of your tube, or lured with bribes and threats... stories do come out of people and fiction happens.
The alchemy of 26 letters + time + effort + other mysterious, unidentifiable ingredients... eventually equals a story where nothing previously existed.
Libraries, magazines, on-line journals, newspapers, bed side tables, drugstores, bookstores and bathrooms are so full of these stories that we don’t take their existence as surprising or improbable. In fact, we’re so blaze’ that we’re not even tempted to burn their creators as witches for having called these fictions up from the nothingness.
As readers we either like or do not like these stories, similar to the casual way that dogs either eat or do not eat the dead. We’re perfectly comfortable praising and castigating, scorning, dissecting, recommending and reviling other people’s creations.
But when you have finished writing a story, or even a draft of a story, and it looks up at you, arms outstretched to be lifted from its crib, you can’t help but feel amazed at the perfectly impossible and miraculous thing that has so mysteriously occurred.
xo
Amy
