Why I Write: Thoughts on the Practice of Fiction. - Review - book reviews

Why I Write: Thoughts on the Practice of Fiction

edited by Will Blythe / Little, Brown, 1998, pp. 256, $22.95

Reviewed by STEVEN G. KELLMAN Literary Scene Editor, USA Today, and Ashbel Smith Professor of Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at San Antonio

*** If, as author Samuel Johnson insisted, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," the history of literature is littered with blockheads. Stephen King, John Grisham, and Danielle Steele demonstrate that you can make a killing by writing, but most other authors barely make a living. Though it is difficult for a writer to earn a living wage, many live to write.

Why? To answer that question, magazine editor Will Blythe has collected responses from 26 contemporary American fiction writers. Several of the contributors--including Rick Bass, Barry Hannah, Jim Harrison, Terry McMillan, Norman Mailer, and Robert Stone--are prominent and productive literary figures. Others, such as Elizabeth Gilbert, Tom Chiarella, and Mark Richard, lack wide reputations or long resumes. Although it is customary in the late 1990s for such a survey to aim for ethnic diversity, none of the women and men from throughout the U.S. whom Blythe has assembled is Latino or Asian-American. Yet, all testify that the peculiar act of putting words on paper is crucial to existence. Their responses are pensive, ponderous, flippant, angry, anguished, and rhapsodic.

For Blythe, writing is "a form of happiness, of supreme awareness that, once experienced, can be given up only with the greatest reluctance." For Lee Smith, "The moment when I am writing fiction is that moment when I am most intensely alive." Mailer, in turn, declares: "The only time I know the truth is at the point of my pen."

The truth is that writing is not easy. For William Vollmann, a physical ailment makes it a constant bout with pain. Why would any sane adult choose the lonely, daunting task of trying to fill blank pages with verbal inventions? The question "why" can mean either what is the reason, the motive, the purpose or what is the cause, the origins of the behavior? The book responds to both.

Many of the essays are exercises in autobiography, describing how the writers came to be authors. "My mother's voice and my father's fists are the two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art," explains Pat Conroy. Thom Jones cites a background of comic books, alcoholism, and menial jobs; James Salter of combat aviation; Smith of Appalachian storytelling. Darius H. James recalls a near-death experience at four and continuing rage at widespread racism.

Many of the responses are more philosophical. For Ann Patchett, writing represents "a life lived well, a life that would stand for compassion, generosity, and grace." Conroy's claim for the writer's calling is grandiose: "A novel is the greatest act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess, that a human being can pull off in one lifetime." The lives of Blythe's contributors have been altered irreversibly by the lure of language. "I knew no other way of not being alone in the world than through language," states Stone. Why I Write brings writers and readers together in exhilarating, collective meditation on the solitary charms of prose fiction.

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