Silence, maybe. Space to write. A quiet column of time in which to give audience to all that’s in one’s head.
That might be what a writer wants.
But that’s not always true. Having made room for these things precisely, a writer can find that they are absolutely not what she wants. She can find herself repulsed by the blank screen, even terrified. Given the space and time, she fails to write and instead examines her hair for split ends, the interwebs for distraction, or, with blindly searching fingers, the table’s undersides for abandoned gum.
Okay, maybe not that last bit.
No, the writer wants silence and space not for their yawning emptiness but for what might possibly, conceivably come of them–if silence and space result in something.
It’s the Something that the writer wants: that perfect word, that shining sentence. The paragraph that miraculously hits the mark. And then scores more paragraphs, coming with ease or terrible labor, that somehow bring to light that thing that was in her head–the thing that was the reason she looked for silence and space in the first place.
But then, what of it?
Once–more than once–satisfied with a string of paragraphs, I sent them off to a dear friend. Here, I was saying. You know the story, or you know it well enough because I’ve told it to you. Read this, I was saying. This, I was saying, is good.
And she responded, in good faith, with something sensible along these lines: I see what you’re saying and I think it’s good, but I don’t really know how it fits, you know, within the structure of the whole, so I can’t really tell, in a way, how good it is.
It was true– and it wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t be expected to appreciate it. She couldn’t even understand it, really, perched isolated like that in the body of an email.
A writer doesn’t really want to write email, I think. Not really. This writer doesn’t, anyway.
So what, in the end, does a writer want?
I’ll tell you.
A writer wants what I had on Friday evening, sitting comfortably in a living room I had never seen before in a town I’d never visited. I was sitting with readers, all members of a book club, and their names and faces were brand new to me–but their love of books was not.
I can tell you that a writer wants readers like those souls sitting there, who had read my book and were considering it, who had opinions and ideas of things in the book that they liked or didn’t, were sold on or maybe were not sold on at all.
A writer wants readers like Melanie, who suddenly spoke up about some paragraphs of the book she especially liked. She said she read them and she read them again. She folded down the corner and marked them, and then she read them aloud to her husband. She told us all why she loved this part, how this part especially rang true for her. How she knows that sometimes faith and life are like this: not things you can plot out so specifically, but that somehow occur, are born, come to light nonetheless.
Melanie said she especially liked that part–and I said I liked it too. I said I loved it, in fact. That, in fact, it was one of my favorites, and I remembered silently that I sent that very part to a friend once who, through no fault of her own, couldn’t possibly appreciate it at the time.
A writer wants moments like this–when the sitting in silence and isolation result in paragraphs that result in a book that connects one like this with Melanie. I didn’t know her until Friday, but I will always know her now and will know, on the chance occasion I re-read that more-favorite-than-some-to-me passages in the book, that Melanie loves it too.
Thank you, Melanie, for loving that part of my book.
Every writer, I think, wants a Melanie.
Afterward, Frank walked back alone to campus, chilled with perspiration. The sky was invariably dull; his mind teemed. He could reconcile none of it. Belief was audacious at best, with repercussions he couldn’t conceive of. Maybe belief was even stupid. And it wasn’t a sudden revelation, in the end. It wasn’t a specific conversation that did it. He can’t remember which time it was–the day or the month–when the leaden sky was peeled back at the corners and Frank was able to see. Healing Maddie Brees, p. 50
