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 tell my students, in whatever ways I can, that they contain multitudes, that nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of their own minds, and that the real business of life is to live in the present and find eternity in a moment. I borrow this, gladly and openly, from Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, and Dickinson — patron saints, as I think of them, of American literature. I ask my students to explore the circumference of their own lives, to celebrate themselves, to write toward a sacred self they have not yet been given permission to notice. Most of them think I am out of my mind. A fair number of them tell me so. I have come to think the skepticism is not an obstacle to the method — it is the method working correctly. Nobody discovers they contain multitudes by being told so gently.
The same conviction runs underneath the fiction. 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 trust that if I watch the ordinary detail closely enough and long enough, it will tell me what it is actually for. It is very rarely only what it appears to be.
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 am also, I’ll admit, incapable of writing about a body in decline without cataloging it in full. The instinct comes from the same place as the classroom instinct: I do not believe dignity should be conditional on being presentable. A character’s diabetes, asthma, gout, baldness, and drinking are not obstacles to her holiness in a story; they are, examined closely enough, the very ground it grows out of. I would rather write toward that ground than around it. 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.
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. A working philosophy, in the end, is only a writer’s honest report of what they have found true often enough to build a habit out of. Mine, distilled: watch the shabby detail until it turns sacred on you. It always does, eventually, if you refuse to look away first.