Publisher's Weekly has a feature called "Why they write," in which authors explain…well, why they write. Here are three of the more interesting ones:
David Ignatius says, "I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story. I had written a front-page piece for the Wall Street Journal in 1983 about how the CIA had recruited Yasser Arafat's intelligence chief during the '70s. After the story was published, I learned through a strange chain of events the inner details of the operation—including the names of people who were still at risk. I decided that the best way to narrate what I knew was in a novel. It was published in 1987 by W.W. Norton as Agents of Innocence and is still in print."
Is there a factual story you know too sensitive or personal to tell as non-fiction? Could it make a good novel?
Stephanie Pearl McPhee writes knitting books. She says, "The truth is that I write because two things have been true about me my whole life. First: I'm a little odd. A good example is that I knit all the time, even at parties and I can't seem to stop, but there is a list of many traits that define me as odd, including, but not ending, with my serious issue with the way that people seem to think you can determine a woman's intelligence by whether or she wears a bra. Controlled breasts don't make you smarter. I'm plenty smart and I don't know where my bra is. Second, I believe that if I only had the opportunity to explain myself properly, then I would be really understood, and then everyone would magically feel the way that I do and behave the way that I do."
Laird Barron, author of Occultation, says "During my adolescence our family dwelt in rural Alaska. We were dirt poor, Depression-era poor. Tarpaper shack and kerosene lamps. In those days I read because that's all I had. I wrote because that's all I had…I used to write as an escape. There's no escape. There's just me sending my voice into the dark, waiting for an echo."
I think there IS escape, if only temporary. And as writers we get to create the place to escape to. Hooray!
