Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

I did say I’d see you next week, but I didn’t say which day!

I continue to be distracted by life. House selling is very consuming: you move out of your own home in advance, denude it of character so visitors can impress their personalities upon it, see their future on the mostly blank canvas you lay before them.

This is just like a book… nah I’m not going to try make that metaphor sing! (Maybe next week, haha!)

But it is interesting: in writing a book I think it is a good idea as the author to set your ego aside. If the book is all about you, rah rah rah, and the next, and the next, I think it would get stale. Better for you the author to be interested in the other, in people, in situations, in dilemmas and difficult moments, and investigate them. Not as you, the author, but as something other. You can try being a dispassionate observer, you can write as the agent of chaos within the story, you can write as the recipient of punishment, or of love, but to write always as yourself, within your own frame of reference, is limiting.

Can you escape yourself, your own frame of reference? I suspect most people nowadays would say it is impossible. When I was young I assumed it was possible, easy even. That, I arrogantly proclaimed, was what imagination was for, what empathy, what sympathy could provide us, that understanding what was universal in all of us would make it possible to write about anything.

Writers have habits, have tics of style. Habits of mind, subjects they return to inevitably. If this is true how can any one of them claim to escape themselves in their writing? It’s hard. Philosophically it may be technically impossible, but I think the attempt may be worth it. Just as the attempt to write the perfect novel is inevitably futile, but not unworthy as a goal to force yourself to stretch further, so the effort to leave yourself behind in a book may be impossible, but it may allow you to go to places you might otherwise never have found.

Write what you know, it is said. I say don’t write who you know. Don’t project your opinions, your ideas of what should happen in any given circumstance. Instead, go into different frames of reference, different moral codes, different emotional reactions, different calculations of risk and reward. Surprise yourself, delight yourself, terrify yourself, but keep going.

This could all be argued to be elaborate delusion, that you the author are always there, an awkward moron wearing ill-fitting skin, looking and acting like a horrific grotesque. To that I say this: hey, if the story works, folk will still be fascinated!

This was my mile wide and inch deep off the cuff ideas blog of the week. I was not here at all, of course. I’m selling a house.