Writing From the White-Hot Center

Writing From the White-Hot Center

This last year I discovered a new writer that I love, the novelist, Lily King. In an essay in the back of one her novels, she tells about doing a reading at an Ivy League college in which, during the Q and A afterwards, she was asked “what factors determine your authorial distance from the narrator?” She responded that “I don’t think when I write. I am like a blind worm on the ground.”  I love that! “A blind worm on the ground.”

She goes on to relate how she loves English literature classes and has been an English teacher herself. How she’s discussed and taken great interest in English-teachery things such as themes and yes, authorial distance. But that when she writes, she doesn’t use her “English teacher brain.” Not in the first draft of writing, “What you need,” she writes, “all you need, is your creative, sensual, wide-open brain.”