Why have people stopped reading?
Predictable plots.
Forgettable characters.
Narratives beholden to the interests of critics and publishers, not readers.
Authors more invested in their moral superiority over older writers than mastery of the written word.
Readers will return when writing returns as a craft.
Why do you still read?
Do you still believe a book can change how you see yourself and the world?
Do you still believe great stories can connect people across cultures, politics, and history?
Do you still believe even a simple tale with flashes of compassion can defend us against emptiness?
I do.
Why do I write?
I was a reader before I was a writer.
I write because my life is haunted by great authors. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, Achebe, Shakespeare, Hrabel, Cather, Stevens, Homer, Hurston, Dante, Wordsworth, and Endo are always at my elbow.
I write because I owe a debt to the books that transformed my life.
I write because I fear we now live with too much literature that robs us of beauty and I refuse to be complicit.
When was the last time a story changed your life?
Great writers can help us experience life more richly, and sometimes more resiliently.
When I am in D.C. and dealing with people consumed by the hunt for power, I think of lines from a poem.
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against Fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crookèd scythe and spade.
When I meet someone who is struggling with some painful reversal of fortune, I remember the book of Isaiah: “A bruised reed He shall not break.”
When I see some of the noblest and best things in my world belittled and vilified, I remind myself of Augustine’s deathbed words (quoting Plotinus) “He is no great man who thinks it a great thing that sticks and stones should fall, and men, who are appointed to die, die.”
I live with the help of other people’s words. So should you.
What’s inside my stories?
What you will find underneath my writings is not a scheme for telling a popular story but a search for what transfigures experience into a journey toward insight or denial.
I write not that you may find yourself becoming one of my characters but, page after page, each of my characters start to become you.