The Philosophy
of Writing

The Ordinary as Sanctuary

I have come to believe that the sacred is not sequestered in a far country, nor reserved for the ceremonies we have built to contain it. It abides here, in the unremarkable hours — in the kitchen light at six in the morning, in the faces we pass and neglect to see, in the small domestic liturgies we perform without knowing that we are performing them. Grace is not clamorous. It does not announce its arrival, nor wait upon our readiness. It waits, rather, in the everyday, with what I can only call patience, for the moment we consent to notice it.

I believe a homely woman singing badly in a cellar stands nearer the sacred than most of what has been painted on a ceiling.

Our failure, then, is not principally a failure of faith but of attention. We mistake the urgent for the important. We defer the essential to a season that never arrives. And we neglect to recognize that the love of others — the plain, unglamorous bond between one person and another — is the single greatest inheritance we are given. Whether we get along or do not get along, love remains the thread that binds us: the one sacred thing, running unbroken beneath every quarrel and every silence, and beneath even our estrangements, which it outlives.

Mercy as Method

I was taught early, in an Irish Catholic household populated by eccentric and tender souls, to forgive and to have empathy — not as doctrine received but as household practice, performed daily and imperfectly by people who had every reason to withhold it. Those flawed, devoted figures became the first of my characters, and they instructed me in the truest lesson of my craft: that even those who have wounded us stand in need of comfort.

So it is with the people I make. I will not write anyone off, on the page or in life. To summon a character into fuller being is an act of mercy rather than of judgment — a way of granting each figure its wound, its reason, its intelligible history, its chance to be understood before it is condemned. A reader always knows when a writer has secretly despised one of his creations: the prose stiffens, the character flattens into a verdict, and the fiction, however accomplished, acquires the faint chill of the courtroom. Judgment is the cheapest instrument in the writer’s case, and the least durable.

I believe grace does not wait upon worthy people to administer it. It travels through cruelty, exhaustion, and bad temper as readily as through kindness, and it is no less real for the unreliable hands through which it passes.

I believe a body in decline — diabetic, gouty, bald, unsteady on its feet — is not a subject the serious writer looks past on the way to something more dignified. It is where dignity actually resides, if it resides anywhere at all. A character’s diabetes, asthma, gout, baldness, and drinking are not obstacles to her holiness in a story; examined closely enough, they are the very ground it grows out of. Sentimentality, as I understand it, is what happens when a writer flinches from the actual body in front of them. Compassion is what happens when the writer keeps looking.

The Discipline of Attention

I did not arrive at a philosophy of writing by sitting down to invent one. It arrived the way most working philosophies do — backwards, out of a classroom, after years of watching what actually moved a roomful of unconvinced teenagers, and after years of noticing which of my own sentences held up under a second and third reading and which ones were only trying to impress me.

I do not think a sentence earns its seriousness by being about a serious subject. I think it earns seriousness by paying close, undistracted attention to something most writing would consider beneath its notice: a chipmunk crossing a patio, a scent of roses arriving mid-sentence, a bottle of suntan oil, a housedress with a pattern of tiny roses on it. My habit, which I did not choose so much as discover I already had, is to place the ordinary and the unspeakable in the same paragraph — a teacup poured, a lie confessed; a hand laid on a bald scalp, a body quietly dying under it.

I believe the ordinary detail is never merely what it appears to be, and that the whole of a writer’s discipline is patience: the willingness to watch a small thing long enough for it to disclose what it is actually for. I trust that if I watch closely enough and long enough, it will tell me what it is actually for. It very rarely is only what it appears to be.

I believe fire is not only punishment. In the right light, at the right hour, upon the right stretch of ordinary water, it is the very material of which glory is made.

Revision as Listening

This is, I recognize, a philosophy built on faith in revision as much as on any single technique. I do not think the religious architecture in a story like “Assumptions” arrived because I sat down and planned a Marian allegory. I think it arrived because I kept returning to the same image — a woman anointed with oil on a beach, a housedress, a sea catching fire in the late light — until the language underneath the language declared itself.

Revision, for me, is less a matter of correcting mistakes than of listening harder to a draft that already knows more than I did when I wrote it. I believe a sentence should be revised until it knows more than its author knew when he began it, and that this is not a failure of planning but the only honest way a true sentence is ever made.

Writing as Communion

I have said before that teaching is communion — that a roomful of unconvinced teenagers and one exhausted teacher, meeting honestly for fifty minutes, amounts to a kind of sacrament administered without a priest. I have come to believe the same is true of writing itself, and I only ever discovered it backwards, sentence by sentence, the way a person discovers most things they already half-believed.

A sentence, when it is working, is not a message sent from a writer who already knows something to a reader who does not. It is closer to a shared table. I sit down not entirely certain what I mean, and the sentence, if I am patient enough with it, tells me — the way a good conversation tells both people something neither of them arrived already knowing. That is the first communion: between the writer and the page, two parties neither of whom fully controls what gets said.

The second is between the writer and the subject — and here I mean subject in the oldest sense, the person or memory or ordinary object being written about. I cannot write about a grandmother anointing a bald scalp with tanning oil, or a mother’s calloused heel, or a housedress with roses on it, without in some sense sitting with that person again, at that table, in that weather. Writing does not preserve the dead so much as it reopens a chair for them.

My family members are my prayers. I wrote that once and meant it more literally than the sentence lets on. To write about a person with enough attention to get their gestures right — the exact word they used, the exact slant of light in the kitchen when they said it — is to hold them in mind the way a prayer holds its subject in mind: not to fix them, not to improve them, only to keep them present a little longer than memory alone would manage.

The third communion is the one I have the least control over and trust the most: the one between the finished page and a reader I will likely never meet. A poem written out of one family’s grief becomes, on a stranger’s late-night reading, a poem about their own. I do not think this is a failure of the poem’s specificity. I think it is the whole purpose of writing something down rather than simply feeling it privately.

Comedy and Reverence, in the Same Breath

Finally — and this is less a technique than a debt I owe my own upbringing — I do not believe moral seriousness and comedy are opposites, or that reverence and mockery cannot occupy the same sentence. My characters are cruel and devoted in the same breath because the people I grew up among were cruel and devoted in the same breath, and I have never trusted fiction that resolves that contradiction too neatly.

I believe comedy and reverence are not opposites; that a family may be cruel and devoted in the same breath; and that any fiction which resolves this contradiction too neatly has told a lie about something.