On Writing

“Fire is never a gentle master.”

Writing is a strange thing.

What can be said about it, really, that hasn’t already been said a thousand times? “Everyone starts with a crappy first draft” or “You just have to put butt in chair and do the work” or “Every writer is his or her own worst critic.”

I suppose I don’t want to talk about everyone else’s conception of writing in this post about my writing philosophy. Instead, funnily enough, I’d like to talk about . . . well . . . my writing philosophy. 

I think the first thing on my list, a truth I’ve come to realize over time as I’ve grown, is that being a writer is really about having a certain state of mind, a certain perception. To be a writer is in many ways to have the same eye as an outdoorsman who finds a finely-dried old log on the forest floor and mutters to himself, “Mmm, yes, that would burn nicely.”

Because storytelling—humanity—is fire.

Think about it: A fire staves off the darkness long enough for you to get home, offers heat when the night is bitter cold, provides comfort and community, a place for people to gather around to be with one another. Fire does all of these things, and so do stories. I think it’s one of those primal cosmic justices, then, that storytelling so often takes place around the bonfire.

But here’s the thing about fire: It never lasts. If you want a fire that will burn forever, go back to school and take an astrophysics class. Even suns can’t burn forever. Fire isn’t everlasting. Fire is warm, and bright, and transient, and fascinating, and ever so fragile, and when morning comes only ashes will remain of it, and you will only be able to dimly recollect its heat. This isn’t to say that fires are pointless, however. Are human lives pointless?

Don’t answer that.

Because, you know, you can’t say the fire wasn’t there. It did its job, after all. It warmed you. Its heat became your heat, and because of that, you can go on to start more and more fires until you burn down half of California.

My point is that you as the writer aren’t looking for immortality: You’re looking for a fine burn. Don’t ask for stability. Don’t ask for safety. Certainly don’t ask for domination (as with fire, to smother your writing is to kill it). Instead, ask for fuel, and a bit of a spark to ignite it.

Hmm, maybe storytellers are just pyromaniacs. But show me a human being who isn’t crazy about burning something, whether it be calories or brain cells.

This doesn’t mean storytelling is inherently uncontrollable. You can definitely manipulate fire. Change the structure or number of logs to change its shape and it grows or shrinks; take out the logs altogether and replace them with some other source of fuel. Hell, these days you can even package fire up into a tank, strap it to your back, and spray it out amongst your enemies, if that’s what floats your boat.

We write. We go through these stories, we burn them, and they give us warmth and keep us going. Perhaps we do this in the hope that the flame outweighs the void, that one day we’ll have enough memory of fire in ourselves that we’ll never be cold again.

Maybe one day.