By: Winslow

Winslow — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:42:36 +0000

What you say here and write in your book (’From Where You Dream’) about yearning - and equally important, about how that yearning manifests itself in terms of sensual experience and details - is one of the most profound insights into the writing and workings of fiction that I have yet to come across.
It is a struggle to identify the right yearning in characters and then to put that to work, but that very struggle has been immensely useful in focusing and guiding and informing my own efforts in this difficult art form.
I have found that the specific yearnings you cite in the book - for self, identity, a place in the universe/world, connection to the other, meaning and relevance, the truth - somewhat difficult to get my arms and mind around, but I suppose that is the nature of the beast. (
I often wonder: Does one have to be fully in touch with one’s own yearning in order to grasp or create the yearning of another and, also, to avoid projecting one’s own yearning, as well as one might understand it, onto one’s characters? Or are we all yearning for more or less the same things and is the trick, therefore, to hone in one particular aspect of it and mine it for the sake of one’s fiction? In other words, write about what we know (to coin a phrase)?
The yearnings that make literary fiction work are more universal and existential - more psychoanalytic, I would venture to say - than those driving the simpler characters appearing in genre fiction. Many books about writing fiction mention the importance of desire, and the obstacles to that desire, but this desire is always described as being directed at a girl/boy, the solution to a crime or other problem, or some other external object.
In any case, I do enjoy reading your books and, dare I say it, yearn to read them all.

Comments on: How I Came to Hell

By: Winslow