SOURCE: Bass, Rick. “Why the Daily Writing of Fiction Matters.” In Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, edited by Will Blythe, pp. 74-83. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998.

[In the following essay, Bass asserts that fiction writing is important because it sharpens the perceptions and imagination of both the emotional and physical senses, and concludes that fiction has a healing effect on the world.]

I live in a remote valley deep in the woods, and I must confess that when I go into town and encounter someone who asks where I live and what I do, for the longest time it was not entirely with pride that I would tell him or her I was a writer, and a thing I especially did not enjoy admitting was that I was a fiction writer. It seemed to me to be like answering, “Oh, I breathe,” or “I'm a yawner,” or “I look at air a lot.” Hunch-shouldered over a one-dimensional sheet of paper, scowling and frowning at the patterns of ink, sometimes laughing, I might as well have answered, it seemed to me then, “I'm invisible” or “I don't do anything.”

For a long time there was a shadow to my movements, and to my life, that asked, How real is this thing that I do? Writing was invisible and airy enough, vaporous an act as it was—one trafficked in ideas as one might traffic in smoke, or scent, or memory—but then even worse, it seemed, was the writing of fiction: invisible ideas about things that had never even happened. A layer of the invisible laid crossways on another layer of the invisible: a grid, a subworld, of nothing. The black hole into which one disappeared for three, four, five hours a day, where everything was within arm's reach and where it all moved very slowly. Even in those rare moments when the pen raced full tilt across the page, left to right, the hand took roughly ten to fifteen seconds to traverse that eight-inch span.

It's such a slow world down there—the invisible second basement below the invisible first basement—that when you emerge, blinking and pulse-stilled, later in the day, and walk up the path from your writing cabin to your real life in your real house, even the most mundane movements of the earth seem to split your mind with onrushing speed. Simple conversation, thought, numerical gymnastics, even a seemingly easy task such as making a phone call or peeling a potato—anything of the regular nature of the world conspires to race past you like a Roger Clemens fastball; you open your mouth to respond, you raise your hand, but by that point the world has moved again. The electric sight of a butterfly dancing over tall green grass causes your brow to furrow, and you watch it with a thing like exhaustion. Things were so slow and controlled just a few minutes ago, back in your writing! Very carefully, then, you begin to ease back into humanity. You walk carefully, as if on ice, disbelieving, perhaps, if your immersion or submersion has been deep enough, that this is the real world, or rather, that you have any business in it.

You make a conscious commitment to try to enjoy the physicality of that part of the day that's left. You can't help but think (even if only with your body, like a kind of echo) about the world you're trying to remake, or protect, or attack, or celebrate—the one you left behind. And when you have a good day, a good physical day, in that second part of the day, you sometimes feel like a traitor when you encounter joy or pleasure, or anything else deeply felt.

Which brings me, I think, to the reason writing is important (the reason any kind of art is important), and especially fiction writing. Art is an engagement of the senses; art sharpens the acuity with which emotions, and the other senses, are felt or imagined (and again, here, it challenges reality: What is the difference between feeling happy and really being happy? What is the difference between imagining you can taste something and really tasting it? A hair's breadth; a measurement less than the thickness of a dried work-skein of ink on paper).

The reading of good writing can engage the senses, can stretch them and keep them alive in the world—that is, sensate, rather than numb. Above all, in the reading of good fiction, the reader is called upon not only to believe in the thing being described, but to feel it deeply even while knowing full well on some conscious level going in that it ain't true—that it's made up. This is a double stretching, one that can require of the reader's mind an extraordinary suppleness. I think that almost everyone would posit that this is a good thing. To put it bluntly, I remember a football coach's arguing with some players whom he wanted to begin lifting weights. They were afraid of becoming muscle-bound and losing their speed and flexibility. The coach was desperate, spitting flecks of saliva in his inarticulate rage. Finally he understood how to explain it: “It'll make you faster and more flexible,” he said. “You can stretch muscle. You can't stretch fat.”

Fiction, by its very nature—being about a thing that, at best, at its most realistic, has not quite happened that way yet—is about a stretching and widening of borders, about options and possibilities of energy and character. Near a story's end, of course, as in life, all this possibility funnels into only one seemingly foregone, inescapable conclusion, but in the beginning, anything is possible—anything can be woven out of the elements at hand.

Good fiction, to my mind, breathes possibility, which is to say also that it breathes a kind of diversity, into every assemblage of characters, energies, and ideas. Reading it makes our minds supple, able to go two ways with equal strength rather than just one way: to consider the “real” but also equally to consider and feel the life of the story we're reading.

Fiction has always mattered because of its ability, its mandate, to reach across the borders and boundaries of reality, to give one the feeling, with each paragraph read, of new territory—but if you believe, as I do, that despite the stitchwork lacing of fiberoptic cables and such, the world is becoming more fragmented and more brittle, then anything that retains the ability to leap across those ever-encroaching and constricting borders is only going to become more important, particularly as we, the hungry, benumbed mass of us, continue swelling at the seams, funneling toward a conclusion that has felt inevitable all along: what my liberal friends call a loss of cultural diversity and what my right-wing friends (way right) call “one world order.”

My beloved valley—the Yaak Valley of extreme northwestern Montana—is but a perfect example of and metaphor for every other finely crafted and specific system that is breaking down or being swallowed whole and assimilated, made general (and hence weak). The Yaak is the wildest place I've ever seen—ice-carved twelve thousand years ago into a magic little seam between the Pacific Northwest and the northern Rockies. It's a land a writer could love easily, a showcase of giant predators—grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, wolverines, golden eagles, coyotes, bald eagles, mountain lions, lynx, owls, bobcats—consuming big prey such as moose, deer, elk, even caribou.

Almost everything eats something else up here: so much tooth-and-claw, so much tension and remaking, so much chase and pursuit—so much like a writer stalking and following a story. Even the insects in the old-growth forests up here are largely carnivorous, consuming each other rather than preying on the forest itself, in which case they would devour the very thing that gives them nourishment.

If the forest in the Yaak, with its seething, specific characters, its incredible richness of diversity, and hence possibility, is so very much like the mind of a fiction writer, then understand, too, that the politics and human influences on the valley, the corporate designs on it, are also so very much like the mind of generalized, homogeneous, world-merge society. You do not need to be a scientist—or a reader or writer of fiction—to take a walk in the Yaak and know that, beautiful and mysterious though it is (seething with mosquitoes and black flies and steamy summer rain), the forest stands at the edge of some kind of loss.

Giant square and rectangular and triangular clearcuts are carved out of the valley yearly, stamped onto the sides of the steep mountains, baking and drying to arid lifeless moonscapes, on land that was previously a rich, diverse jungle. Roads rip through these old, secret corridors, old, secret paths of wolves and grizzlies, bringing light and heat into a place that was previously cool and dark.

Everything in the Yaak is being cut off from every other thing. The roads and clearcuts reduce the living, pulsing whole into a series of isolated, machinelike parts. William Kittredge has said, “As we destroy that which is natural, we eat ourselves alive.”

In the face of such loss, such pain, one can enter shock. Numbness becomes a defensive mechanism, as does denial.

Fiction can be like a salve or balm to reverse this encrustation. Like sweating on a good hike, or building a stone wall, it can reengage the senses. It can reconnect isolated patches, islands of dulling senses and diminishing imagination, diminishing possibilities.

The other day, I was in my cabin working on fiction through a long green summer morning. Earlier a lion had caught a fawn, and the fawn's bleats had shaken me, as had, when I got up and went out to investigate, the sight of the lion leaping up from its hiding spot in the willows and running away. After that, it was a slow day for me, one in which I had trouble focusing. I've been using mostly analogies of lateral movement in discussing the travels on which fiction takes you, as if it were some horizontal surface along which you moved when going from the physical to the imagined; but I think it can also be described as travel along a vertical path. It often feels as if you were descending from the rock world, the real world, into the imagined one; and on a good day as if you could slip down into that chute, that shaft, into the below-place, easy as pie, like some subaqueous diver weighted with lead ankle wraps, or like some scientist suited up in an iron bathysphere: a quick descent, a gentle bump on the bottom, and you're there, and you can begin writing. Other days, though, it is as if you were full of air and could not sink beneath the surface—and certainly, on that day I heard the squawling and got up from my desk and walked out and flushed the lion up from out of those willows, the day turned raggedly (though wonderfully) into one of those days on which there can be no escape from the deep physical, no journeying across that gap into the deeply imagined. It was perhaps like being caught in a leghold trap.

I kept trying—working on a sentence, scratching it out. Trying it from another angle, scratching it out.

It was like a joke. My cabin's right at the edge of a vivid green marsh, full of life and rot. A south summer wind was blowing hard, sweeping laterally across the marsh, flattening the tall grass and slamming mountain-scent in through the open screened windows as I tried to descend, still juiced from the lion and juiced, too, now, from this, the incredible gusting wind, and the scents it brought, and all that green, green waving light. A wall of thundercloud came moving up the valley, rising like some wave larger than anything seen at sea, and it rolled in over the marsh and brought hail and then slashing rain, a drumming, shouting sound against my tin roof, deepening, in all that moisture, the smells of the marsh, crushing flowers, releasing the scent of wild strawberries after the sun came back out; and I had to just sit there, pen in hand, and float on the surface, unable even to get my head beneath the water.

Is there a story—are there stories—so important to tell that you could descend beneath this fury, such a day's tempest, find them, and deliver them to the reader? Yes; I believe there are.

Are such stories as real as the storm-lash itself—those precious few stories? Yes. Or maybe. Yes.

And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the “real” world—rock, bone, wood, ice—and elements of the real—not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself—inside stories and tales and dreams. You write a sentence about a hawk's swooping on a swallow and have no sooner finished it and looked up than you see feathers falling from the sky.

But still, for the most part, each resides in its own country: the real and the imagined; the actual and the possible. And it's important to keep the path, the trail, between the two open; important to keep the brush at least somewhat beaten back, to allow relative ease of passage between the two. Which brings us finally to the notion of why the daily doing of it is important—the writing of fiction, if that's what you do, and to a lesser extent, the reading of it. You've got to keep the grass worn down between the two worlds, or you'll get lost as shit; and sometimes you get a little disoriented, even with daily passages and explorations of the two further territories. You can't help but remember what Faulkner is alleged to have said when asked whether he wrote daily or only when the inspiration hit him. It's said he replied that he wrote only when the inspiration came, but that he made sure it came every morning at ten o'clock sharp when he sat down at his desk.

Another of these kinds of smart sayings I remember is one in which some prolific writer was asked how he'd managed to publish so many books. He said that it was quite easy: a page a day equaled a book a year. I've been working on my first novel for over twelve years now, and such statements give me encouragement and remind me that it's not just books that are important but also the sentences within them. It should be an obvious realization, but its implications become clear only when you do the math. The present draft of my novel is about 1,400 pages, which parses out to approximately one paragraph a day over those twelve years. The novel is, of course (I hope), nothing so boring as one paragraph from each day of my life over that twelve-year span, but rather a paragraph per day of a parallel and imagined life—which, after a dozen years of daily entering into and exiting from it, can make a writer increasingly a little goofy and also a bit tired, as if he or she were working one long stretch of double overtime, or had two families, or two lives.

We write fiction, I think, for very nearly the same reasons that we read it: to sharpen our senses and to regenerate those dead or dying places and parts within us where the imagination has been lost or is trying to be lost. Pine trees lose their needles every three years, and bears enter the earth, the dream-world, and float in sleep for five or six months at a time, but we humans are fragile and almost hairless, shivering on the earth, and our cells are dying and being reborn daily; we must eat often, and sleep nightly, pulled out each day by the sun. Almost all of our rhythms are compressed into parameters of one single earth's rotation. It is the rhythm into which we have evolved; it fits our bodies, physically, and it fits our minds and our imaginations. We can accumulate the days and their imaginings and then craft and create things beyond a day's work, but the days are our basic building blocks—a day's work is like a paragraph. To leave too many gaps in the thing being crafted or imagined, to work too erratically, is to run the risk, I'd think, of weakening with gaps and absences of rhythm the foundation and structure of the thing one is attempting to make real, or attempting to make be felt as deeply as if it were real.

That famous advice of Hemingway's is repeated often, about how a writer should leave a day's work slightly unfinished and at a point where he or she knows something of what will be in the next paragraph, to help facilitate the ease with which the rhythm may be resumed the next day. The descent of the bathysphere, vertically, or the morning trek into the woods, horizontally. The passage from here to there. The practice of staying supple rather than becoming brittle.

The daily doing of it is nothing less than a way to rage against constriction and entrapment, fragmentation and isolation, the poisonous seeds of our monstrous success in terms of our biomass and our effect upon the world, but at this cost: the erosion of the individual, the erosion of the specialist, the unique, the crafted.

The stories we tell in fiction—stories of warning or celebration, stories of illustrative possibility—are important. When the shit really hits the fan for a civilization, artists can become more important than ever, in helping to bend a culture back to another direction, away from the impending and onrushing brick wall.

I believe this. I believe that by crossing the path back and forth enough times, as if weaving something, fiction can become as real as iron or wood; that it can rust, rot, or burn; that it can nurture and nourish, or inflame. I believe that it can decide actions and shape movements, sculpt us more securely or intelligently (as well as more passionately) into the world, just as the continents on whose backs we are riding sculpt our cities, towns, and cultures.

I believe fiction can heal things, and I think we would all agree, now more than ever, that we can use some healing, and that we need it daily.