More Tobias Wolff

And the beauty of fiction is that you don’t have to be loyal to memory, and you don’t have to be answerable to anybody for your version of things.

Writers, to my way of thinking, are no more free in their choices than most people. Our material chooses us; certain things engage us, certain things do not. Certain subjects call me out and I feel like my feet are on the ground when I’m writing about them and no doubt this has led here and there to apparent repetitions and correspondences that may be deceptive in that they lead the reader to assume an autobiographical basis for the work. There’s not really much I can do about that. I take comfort in the way that, say, Flannery O’Connor would tend to revisit the same situations without losing much in the way of her power or variety. You know, you have the surly daughter who is driven nuts by her mother’s cheer and simplistic piety and common sense, and a shiftless handyman around somewhere. There are recurring patterns in her work, but she manages to refresh them each time out. I suppose I hope to achieve something like that.

I don’t deliberately choose violence the way you might pick a wrench out of a tool kit, or dip my brush into that color rather than this color. It has to arise in some way from the demands of the story and the people and the milieu I’m writing about.

As Milton says, “The mind is its own place.”

When I was young I idealized writers like Hemingway, Jack London, Orwell, writers who were active in the world. There’s no question at all that when I joined the army there was a kind of literary impulse behind it. I’d learned all the wrong lessons from Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque and James Jones, all these writers I admired—they were telling me, Don’t be such a fool as to get yourself in a position where you’re going to get shot for nothing by some other fool. And all I could think of was, Jeez, they wrote these great novels because they put themselves in danger and traveled to places where nobody cared if they lived or died. Great! That’s for me! I’m not saying I thought this out in so many words—I didn’t, I’m not an idiot— but the appetite for “experience” is natural to young writers. I’ve seen it often, and surely I had it, no question. But to get back to Flannery O’Connor, what kind of experience did she have, afterall? She spent, what, one year away from her farm in Milledgeville? Yet her stories are full of life and drama and real humanity, and it’s because she kept her eyes open. Experience is about seeing what’s around you, not going different places and putting yourself in danger—it’s about being attentive, seeing how things work, what they add up to.

For better or worse, it’s become second nature—this habit of detachment and constant judgment. It’s an occupational hazard of the writing life, the sense that life is here for you to review in some way, to apply a rubric to. I have a story, “Bullet in the Brain,” about a book critic who is so jaded, and so filled with allusion and literary reference, that even when his very life is threatened he hears the threat as a series of clichés that he thinks are risible. This habit of being at a distance from life can remove you from what’s real, if you’re always stepping out of the stream of life in order to look at it. It is something that writers have to be alert to. Paying attention is certainly part of the problem, but it’s also the antidote. If you’re really paying attention, you will be reimmersed in life.

We all tell stories. The merest child comes home and tells the story of how the evil teacher has abused him, or how he defeated a bully in class that day; people come home from work and tell stories about their fatuous boss and we’re all ears. We love hearing stories of other people’s misfortunes—not terrible misfortunes, we don’t like that, but if somebody has taken a really expensive holiday, we don’t mind hearing that their flight was canceled and they had to sleep on the airport floor, and that there was no snow on the slopes when they finally arrived, and that the heating crashed in their hotel and that they had to wear several layers of clothing to bed every night. We live by stories. It’s the principle by which we organize our experience and thus derive our sense of who we are. We’re in an unceasing flow of time and events and people, and to make sense of what goes past, we put a beginning and an end to a certain thing, and we leave things out and we heighten other things, and in that way we break the unbroken flow into stories, because that’s the only way we can give it significance. And that’s why people will never agree that a friend’s or relative’s memoir is accurate. We have left things out without even realizing it, and heightened other things, but to our friend the missing moment was paramount and the heightened moment of no importance at all.

Writers wait for that moment when the material starts to carry them. It happens more rarely than one wants to think, and you’re a fool if you don’t give in to it when it does—drop everything else and go with it.

-Tobias Wolff, Paris Review