L.L. Barkat

Maybe Laura__ real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday die__f not of a worm or a ceiling, then of something else. The very nature of a story admitted this reality. To be a writer was to say, yes, I am just another Murasaki, and it is quite possible that no one will remember my name.

Have tea, might write,_ Laura returned.

Maybe you didn__ need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn__ need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you__ lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do the job for you, if only you dared to dream.

One Bagatelle, and I__l raise you a novel,_ Megan had tweeted back.__riting for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire,_ Laura returned.__riting for me,_ Megan had typed.____l write you a tea fortune.___o deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.

If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions.

Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She__ begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the story might be a prolonged exercise in Shelley__ personal terrors. The subtitle of the work was 'Prometheus Unbound,' and Laura wondered if Shelley herself was not Prometheus in the form of the wandering monster, who desperately sought love and acceptance but was ultimately driven to face an icy landscape that seemed almost fantastical__he way our own subconscious could be, white and frozen-slippery.

You could use a moth like that as a symbol in a novel, but it was trite, wasn__ it? The old moth-to-the-flame image had been used and used again. It was the stuff of amateur poetry. And she, having so little experience crafting a story, would be the most in danger of falling into trite approaches. If she wrote a novel, it probably would be about her father. And the male Luna moth would haunt its pages. Everyone would recognize the work as that of a first novelist. __he wrote about herself through the lens of her father.__he really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just the littlest bit.

She meant you have to live a story for a time.''And?''And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?''Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.''Kind of the perfect question to answer in fiction.

This is what Laura loved about literature. You could see things in it that perhaps weren__ there, but might be. And even that didn__ matter if, in the end, readers needed something to be there. They could bring their somethings to a text, as co-creators, embedding a needed reality in the story that, if it was flexible enough, would allow new threads to take their place beside the author__.

Writing starts with living.

We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.__rom Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

Writing starts with living.__umors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan__ request? Couldn__ Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term __ire_ exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of __editious roots_ that could __ynamite the world_ the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling__ut-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies.