A Thought About Writers

One thing stands out to me: I like writers. I like those people who struggle to say something with fiction. Those people who struggle to shape an idea, or a character or a scene, struggle to get a voice and hold on to it through the whole of a long project. I like those people who do not gaggle about with theoretical abstractions of what a book should be, or could be, or might be, but instead dare to face the thing that they actually can create, and that will never come close to the platonic ideal of whatever some outsider will say is good. I like the people who dare the messy complexity of hundreds of thousands of words, tangled, all connected, all influenced by one another, lace webworks, painstakingly and messily constructed. Those webs of story might shake in the wind, and might come apart when people prod them, might barely manage to cling to a shape, but I love them for their bravery.