I’ve long believed that what has kept writers, again myself included, from fully transcending their personal experiences on the page was fear of incompetence: I can’t write a plot that involves a kidnapping because I’ve never been kidnapped, etc. But what if it’s the opposite? What if the reason we find it so difficult to cleave our fiction from our experience, the reason we’re so loath to engage our imaginations and let the story rise above the ground floor of truth, isn’t that we’re afraid we’ll do the job poorly, but that we’re afraid we’ll do it too well? If we succeed, if the characters are fully imagined, if they are so beautifully real that they quicken and rise off the page, then maybe our own experiences will feel smaller, our actions less consequential. Maybe we’re afraid that if we write what we don’t know, we’ll discover something truer than anything our real lives will ever yield. And maybe we encounter still another, more insidious threat—the threat that if we do our jobs too well, if we powerfully render characters who are untethered from our experience, they’ll supplant us in the reader’s mind. Maybe we worry that fiction’s vividness will put our own brief and negligible lives into too stark a relief, and the reader, seduced by literature’s permanence, will leave us behind. Maybe we worry we’ll be forgotten. Maybe we’re afraid of what we want most—for our characters to outlive us—and maybe the possibility that the writer, not the reader, will get lost in the pages of a great book is, ultimately, too much for us to bear.
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