Interest

An Element of Fiction

Have you ever tried to write a story or an essay about something you cared little or nothing about?

Hard to get going? I’d say almost impossible to get going. In fact, unless you’re writing purely for money (a hired pen) and have built up a tolerance for such interest-less writing, it’s a good recipe for writer’s block.

And if, somehow, you managed to write the piece, I’d put good money on the reader being more indifferent to the result than you. For as John Gardner puts it, “Nothing can be made to be of interest to the reader that was not first of vital concern to the writer.”

Notice the two words “vital” and “concern”. That’s pretty transparent code for really, really caring about the subject. Perhaps more than about anything else. And if you do, you can hardly wait to get to your keyboard or pen to begin writing. No writer’s block in sight and words just seem to bubble up on their own. That’s writing going well.

You could of course try to tell yourself (as in convince yourself) that, sure, you really care about this topic but as Philip Gerard puts it, “You can’t fake interest in a subject.” And few things are truer. The subject matter, or the character, or the plot have to be of vital concern to you — your interest brimming. And when it does, your fingers will fly, and you’ll find that your interest is contagious, your reader will sense it too and will feel that here’s something worth reading.

Flannery O’Connor certainly agreed when she proposed that “The great novels we get in the future are not going to be those that the public thinks it wants or those that critics demand. They are going to be the kind of novels that interest the novelist.”

William Zinsser suggests, “Living is the trick. Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That’s almost the whole point of becoming a writer.”

Every writer I love, and they are quite a few, have this in common: they are looking for something, some answer to some mystery. What they ponder and probe matters a great deal to them, you can tell. Yes, you, as a reader, can tell. And it is the writer’s interest that fans mine and sees me through the book, and almost always, profitably.

Richer for having read it.

And, after all, that’s the point of reading, isn’t it?

© Wolfstuff

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