The thing you can’t stop thinking about
I am not interested in writing that isn’t obsessive. Who is? We’re all drama queens in the end. We all come to stories with two basic questions: Who do I care about? And What do they care about? As long as our hero, or heroine, cares deeply about something (i.e. is obsessed), and as long as they’re willing to tell us their own twisted version of the truth, we’ll come along for the ride.
But look: our best art implicates us. It induces us to experience the intensity of feeling that is absent from the rest of our lives. It unleashes the closet obsessive in all of us.
I used to spend hours trying to explain this to my students at Boston College, who were forever confusing emotional evasion with literary restraint. To the stubborn ones, I often issued an order that I received years ago, from an elderly writer who had suffered my own wretched early burps of prose. The only thing that matters is the thing you can’t stop thinking about, he told me: Dress it up how ever you like, son, but tell me the goddamn truth.
- Steve Almond (via: Jonathan Carroll’s blog)
