by Megan Robinson ’17
On February 6, Tim O’Brien visited Gonzaga and took questions from students and community members in a Q&A session. Here are one creative writing student’s reflections on it.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” Ernest Hemingway said.
He’s not the only one to find the ‘romantic’ craft of writing in some way unpleasant. As a creative writing student, I spend my days dedicated to this particular field of work. It’s taxing—spending hours alone at the desk in the hopes of putting a few good words together. You hope against hope that it’s not for nothing, that something meaningful will come of it, even if it’s only some kernel of personal truth to carry with you as you go on with your life. Not all writers will become famous novelists or poets; most won’t even go on to teach the craft. All writers come to the junction where they have to ask, why do it?
Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried and other great works of fiction, describes his daily routine: go to bed early, wake up at 1:30 a.m., spend an hour cleaning the kitchen, then get to writing in the dead silence of night.
“Story,” he says. “Story is what brings me back at 1:30 in the morning every day. It makes me get out of bed and face what I hate.”
Story is that symbolic magic that draws us in, elicits our empathy, makes us human. It is that magic that storytellers—writers, artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, people—hope to preserve in giving the story any particular form. Think of the parent improvising a fairy tale at bedtime, or the cinematographer arranging each frame just so. Every decision counts in getting the story across.
Still, once a writer’s work is out in the world, the kinds of judgments it will face are entirely subjective. Some will love it, some will hate it, and, worst of all, some will hardly respond to it at all. This is the first tough lesson of writing: finding a reason to keep doing it, no matter what the response.
O’Brien said, “The great abiding mysteries of the physical universe are about uncertainty.” The job of a novelist is not to provide answers, but rather to depict moral complexity, confusion, and uncertainty. They are conditions of life, and they captivate us.
“What we’re fascinated by, I think many of us, is the uncertainty itself,” O’Brien says. We don’t ask questions about things we already know; simple questions and answers don’t satisfy our curiosity. “Every time I add one plus one it always equals two. But who are you? And who am I? Those are mysteries to me that will always abide, and they abide not just for novelists. They abide for all of us.”
In the end, writing, and stories in general, are about one great question—what if?
What if a young man and a young woman from rival families fall in love? What if a great white whale bites off a sea captain’s leg? What if a curious girl falls down a rabbit hole?
A story may not necessarily ‘answer’ these questions in the typical sense, but in their quest toward answers, the best stories expose some truth and some uncertainty, impart wisdom and wit, and detail sensation and emotion in ways we had not considered..
Thank you, Tim O’Brien, for taking us with you to Vietnam, and leaving us with your bit of personal truth.
From GU News Service: Watch this video recap of O’Brien’s hour-long question-and-answer session.