Ecstasy

Why do we write fiction? There are all sorts of mundane or usual answers to that question--to express ourselves, to tell a story, to entertain, to explore the human condition, to be well-known, to be known well, to be wealthy. But there are other answers that have more to do with the actual moment of creation. It's perhaps a little more personal and therefore embarrassing or revealing to talk about--or revelatory. It's the moment when you feel as if you are outside your body yet more intensely inside your body than ever before. It's the spark, the shock that makes you keep slogging through endless days when all you're doing is marching through pages and hoping that the rewrites, the editor in you, will salvage the material. Is it simply a matter of allowing the world into you like water poured into an empty glass? Is it a manifestation of something else entirely?***Every detail on the sidewalk, from a rage of red-orange leaves to a green meandering crack in the concrete, took on a binocular significance. It was a forethought of the awareness that overtook him when he wrote: the premonition of something moving through him and onto the page, the pen in hand become a blur and the heart so full, limbs aflame, body with fever. Like sparks burrowing into you until, finally conquered, you become vessel, container not containedtrapped and freeand all the little hairs on your arms rise, and you feel as if your own skin has been painlessly flayed back to reveal, beneath the perfect diagram of veins and arteries, the beauty and horror of the worldthe words like tiny mysteries and the combinations of words solutions to those mysteries, and yet more mysterious for the revelation...