And writing is ultimately about making decisions – though she wasn’t entirely sure what a supreme fiction was (Poetry is the supreme fiction madame – Stevens). However, she felt she had lived with the words long enough that she should begin to find out.
For novelists like herself – prose writers – it seemed to mean putting yourself into your novel. Poets seemed like they could exist in the ether of the poems, thus having other ways to arrive at supreme fictions, though Whitman certainly interjected himself into his work.
She supposed she could create a place based on a place – see Yoknapatawpha (Faulkner) – or a place based on no place – Winesburg (Anderson) – or a place based on a place that was not actually like that place – Buenos Aires (Borges) – but her fiction, like herself, had always moved around. She did not like the idea of being bound, not to a place.
Besides, to reside in a supreme fiction was not the same as being one. No, she had to enter into her own stories somehow, that would be the only way. She sat down at her computer, stared at the cursor, blinking.
She typed her name, breathed in deeply. Waited.
The cursor winked.
Finally, she had an idea. She could caricature herself and fiction writers in general. She could call herself The Fiction Writer, and write in the third person. Yes, and she would change her gender.
Yes, that was it.
And in this way, she could talk about some realizations she was having recently about writing itself. Realizations which felt profound, yet seemed heavy-handed when she tried to write them down. This way, they would become the character’s realizations rather than her own. After all, she was of two minds, the mind that had the thought and the mind that found the thought heavy-handed when written out. Why should she claim either mind when they weren’t her mind? Or at least not her mind ultimately. Hers encompassed both. And wasn’t that the largesse of being a fiction writer?
Very well, then, she said aloud, I contradict myself… I am large, I contain multitudes.
She sat down to write – this was good stuff.
Then, a few paragraphs in, she stopped, looked up, frowned.
But surely they would tell her that these things weren’t short stories. Surely, they would try to say they were something else. But then she remembered something someone had said to her once. It was another writer, at a reading.
Fuck em, he’d said. You’re the writer. You tell them what a story is.
Fuck em, she said.
Went on writing.