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| Photo by Sue Watts |
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being "like this". Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as theyshape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button
sewn on as the
Bond Street tailors would have it. Life
is not a series of gig
lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a
semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness
to the end. Is it not the task of the
novelist to convey this
varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit,whatever
aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the
alien and external as possible? We are
not pleading merely for
courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction
is a little other than custom would have us believe it. "Modern Fiction" (CR1 149-50)
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