The longer I write, the more I’m intrigued by how a word can conceal as much if not far more than it reveals. Yet if regarded with care, any word can serve not as a wall but as a window to what it can’t further express.

One of my favorite books is The Hundred Greatest Stars, by the astronomer James B. Kaler, because he transforms the word “star” from a single encompassing category into something like a prism reflecting the light of a dizzying variety of stellar objects.

Take, for instance, the star V V Cephei. This red supergiant, a mere 2,000 light years away, is so large that its diameter is almost the size of the orbit of Saturn. How big is that? Well, take a look at this humbling comparison with our own star, the sun:

Another star, W Ursae Majoris, is an even closer neighbor, only 160 light years away, which places it practically right across the street from us in the galactic neighborhood. This is a double star system, though with a doozy of a twist—the two stars are so close together that they actually touch as they whirl around each other, forming, in essence, a strange revolving single object:

Kaler’s book is filled with white dwarf stars; double, triple and even four star systems; neutron star x-ray bursters; super magnetic stars; a whole panoply of cosmic difference. After reading his book, I’ve found it impossible to peer up at the night sky and see those scattered grains of light as anything resembling a uniform category. The word “star” now offers the infinite possibilities of the universe itself.

Our universe is a big place, though, so why not take a look at a word that operates on a more intimate level? A smile is among the most common of human expressions, one that cuts across all cultures. Yet the word “smile” implies a singular form that it is not and can never be. As Daniel McNeill observes in his book The Face, smiles “vary like a kaleidoscope. Turn the tube slightly, change a nuance here or there, and a new meaning arises.” Some languages are better at expressing this morphing quality than others. In Japanese, several words take on this challenge: “niko-niko, a smile of peacefulness and content; nita-nita, a smile tinged with contempt; ni, a brief grin; niya-niya, an often unpleasant way of smiling when suppressing joy; ninmari, a smile after achieving a goal; chohshoh, a sneer.”

The task of a writer, it seems to me, is recognizing that any word will take you only so far, that its core definition is simply a first step. Without this understanding, words can actually restrict your vision of the world.

As a teacher, I’ve become weary of the words “beginning” and “ending,” which I feel limit my students’ attempts to learn how to shape a story. Sometimes a young writer’s story will first feature reams of exposition, backstory upon backstory before a scene finally offers the drama we crave, all in the service of “beginning” the story in some chronological fashion. And sometimes that same hypothetical young writer will “end” a story with a flourish that implies, well, that’s that!

Yet there can be no “beginning” to any story, because there will always be a series of events that have come before, and as for an “ending,” the world simply continues on its way regardless of our attempts at closure, doesn’t it?

So I ask my students to think of their first page as the point of entry into an already unfolding narrative, and to think of the last page as their point of departure from that same continuing narrative. Charles Dickinson’s hypnotic short story “Risk” may take place entirely during a single evening while a circle of friends and acquaintances play a game of Risk, but its most central drama concerns the loss of a child that occurred one year earlier. On the other hand, Graham Swift’s story “Learning to Swim,” though it takes place within an afternoon’s half hour at the beach, dramatizes the moment when a child makes his choice of navigation between his two warring parents, a choice that will, the reader assumes, set the structure of the family for many years to come.

Where you enter a narrative and where you exit gives you the shape of the fiction you are trying to call into being. Or, to put it more bluntly, the bullet may be the wider world of your narrative flying along, but the apple is your story.

During the production of the movie version of The English Patient, the novel’s author, Michael Ondaatje, became friends with the film editor for the project, Walter Murch.  Their relationship eventually blossomed into The Conversations, a book of, well, conversations, Ondaatje and Murch’s back-and-forth about any subject under the sun, filmmaking, art, fiction, science, poetry.  A wonderfully intelligent and witty book.

One of my favorite sections is their discussion of the quantum physicist John Wheeler’s invention of a variation on the parlor game Twenty Questions, a variation he called “Negative Twenty Questions.”

In the normal version, someone leaves briefly while the remaining folks agree to choose a particular object that’s in the room. The returning person gets twenty questions to guess the agreed-upon object, with “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” being the classic opening gambit.

In Negative Twenty Questions, however, all the remaining folks privately pick their own objects, though the person returning doesn’t know this.  In fact, as Murch observes, “Nobody knows what anyone else is thinking.  The game proceeds regardless, which is where the fun begins.”

When returning Joe (let’s call him) asks the standard bigger-than-a-breadbox question, if the first person says no, then the other players, who may have selected objects that are bigger, now have to look around the room for something that fits the definition.  And if “Is it Hollow?” is Joe’s next question, then any of the players who chose new and unfortunately solid objects now have to search around for a new appropriate object.  As Murch says, “a complex vortex of decision making is set up, a logical but unpredictable chain of ifs and thens.”  Yet somehow this steady improvisation finally leads—though not always, there’s the tension—to a final answer everyone can agree with, despite the odds.

Wheeler thought this game reflected the structure of the quantum world, yet Murch observes that it reminds him of making a film: the casting will influence how the costumer will dress the lead actor, which will in turn influence the art director’s design of the set, which in turn influences. . .  and somehow, with all these subtle developing variables, a movie gets made.

Reading this section in The Conversations over again recently (it’s the kind of book that invites returning to and making rediscoveries), I was reminded of the great Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s description of writing a novel, from her Selected Cronicas:

“The book came together simultaneously as it were, emerging more here than there, or suddenly more there than here: I would interrupt a sentence in Chapter Ten, let us say, in order to write Chapter Two, which I would then abandon for months on end while I wrote Chapter Eighteen.  I showed endless patience: putting up with the considerable inconvenience of disorder without any reassurance that I would finish the book.”

How familiar this seems to me, various parts of a book calling to each other, unexpected connections reaching out.

I first became aware of this process when I was a graduate student at City College and studied with Donald Barthelme.  I remember him urging me during one conference to consider writing a novel—probably because at the time I mainly wrote prose poems that barely extended into the territory of the short story, and Don always liked to mix things up a bit.  The very idea, though, alarmed me. I couldn’t imagine ever writing any single thing that continued into hundreds of pages, and my squeaky timid protest to Don’s suggestion was, “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

His response surprised me.  “Whenever I begin a novel,” he said, “the beginning never stays at the beginning.  It ends up in the middle, or near the end.  It never stays put where I started.”

I’d always assumed that one began a novel by starting on page one and slogging through to the last sentence, so this revelation served as some relief to me, and made the task of writing a novel appear a little more approachable.  Still, I don’t think I fully understood him until I began, years later, to work on my first novel, and found myself putting together its different sections like pieces of a puzzle that had as yet no defined borders, while trying to discover and answer my own secret twenty questions.

In a recent post I wrote about the thought bubbles of our private selves, the stories we generate as we go about our lives, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Those thought bubbles continually rise and fall within us, but what are the geographical perimeters of that “within”?

I remember seeing a television special years ago, hosted by the science writer Timothy Ferris. In that special, he tried to demonstrate how long it took for life to develop on earth. He did this by driving a racing car across 4.5 kilometers (nearly three miles) of the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah, a desolate place that seems to go on forever.

His starting point was a line representing the formation of our planet, 4.5 billion years ago, and then he drove for three kilometers until he came to a line representing the origins of single-celled life, bacteria and algae, about 1.5 billion years ago. From there he drove for a kilometer until he came to the line for the beginnings of multicellular life, in the Cambrian era, a half billion years ago. He then raced on for another half a kilometer past the rise of reptiles, dinosaurs, and mammals.

Finally he stopped the car and walked the last few yards (let’s dispense with the metric system for the clincher, okay?), which corresponded to the origin of our earliest human ancestors. A half a yard from the very end marked the first appearance of Homo sapiens, and much less than an inch from the finish line, the narrowest sliver of highway represented all of human recorded history.

Now why not transpose the little sliver that Ferris calls human recorded history and call it instead the tiny portion of us that is available to others in any daily face-to-face contact. That sliver is the present moment, and behind it, equivalent to the long drive across the Salt Flats, are all the years of your experience and the multitude of your thoughts and all the stories of your life. So much of us remains hidden, inaccessible. That’s why humans invented language, why we invented storytelling.

So whenever you’re about to fashion a short story or an essay out of someone in your life, remember, fiction writers—and take caution, nonfiction writers—that any person’s mystery offers you nearly three miles of invention.

When I lived in Lisbon I exchanged a few e-mails with the writer José Luís Peixoto, but somehow we never managed to meet; my loss, particularly since it has taken me a couple of years to read his marvelous novel The Implacable Order of Things, which won the José Saramago Prize in 2001.

The novel is set in the farmland of Portugal’s Alentejo region, a world of low sloping hills, cork and olive trees, golden wheat fields, and a relentless heat that Peixoto captures here nicely: “The earth was its own silence on fire. The sun was a blazing heat lighting up the flame-colored air: the aura of a fire that was the aura of the earth, that was the light and the sun.”

It’s a world where “swallows fly close to the ground, like harmless volleys from a slingshot,” and where characters can live well past 100 years, as if baked into a sort of semi-immortal beef jerky by the Alentejo’s ever-present sun. Peixoto further peoples his novel with Siamese twins who are joined at the pinky, a brutal giant, a scheming sheepdog, a man with no right arm or leg who somehow manages as the town’s premier carpenter, a cook who sculpts her meals into elaborate landscapes, and an oracular voice locked in a hallway chest that seems to hypnotize some of the characters with pronouncements like “Perhaps there’s a light inside people, perhaps a clarity; perhaps people aren’t made of darkness, perhaps certainties are a breeze inside people, and perhaps people are the certainties they possess.”

These individual certainties, though, are almost never shared by the characters, who are unable to breach their invisible interior walls, and this lack of connection sets in place turns of fate that continue in the novel through not one but two generations.

Translated by Richard Zenith into a beautiful English that often rises to the rhythms of a desperate prayer, this novel’s accumulation of wisdoms lingers in my mind, particularly this hard truth: “We are granted our heart’s desire only for it to be definitively taken away, since our dream of it perishes.”

While I was reading Peixoto’s novel, I discovered by chance a Portuguese band that I have to confess to my shame I’d never noticed when living in Lisbon, A Naifa. Now I can’t stop listening to their music. They combine the traditions of fado with a contemporary, at times almost ambient rock sound, a strange brooding mixture of past and present. In many ways, the songs of their album “3 minutos antes de a maré encher” became the soundtrack for me of The Implacable Order of Things.

One of my favorite A Naifa songs is their heartbreaking “Todo o amor do mundo não foi suficiente” (“All the Love in the World Wasn’t Enough”). This video of the song is especially moving since it records one of the band’s last performances with their bassist, João Aguardela, who died too young of cancer in January 2009. Rest in peace, João.

The anthology Now Write! Nonfiction, edited by Sherry Ellis, has just been published, and because I have an entry in the book I received an advance copy. Paging through it, I was delighted to see that Jenny Boully was among the other writers represented.

I’m a great admirer of Boully’s work, particularly how she structures her books. The Body is a book-length essay without the essay: all you get on each page are the footnotes, which is an eerie experience, like hearing an echo but not the initiating voice. Her The Book of Beginnings and Endings is, well, just that: a collection of the first and last chapters of books she’s invented. Once again, negative space eloquently reigns.

My favorite Boully book, though, is [one love affair]*. The titles of each short chapter are phrases from books, it soon becomes clear, that the author is reading. For instance, the chapter title ” . . . where sad, incomprehensible scenes were played over and over” is a quote from Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, and the text of Boully’s chapter takes the form of thoughts or remembered scenes that she then calls up in response to that phrase. Eventually, the various phrases of the titles engender the reflective narrative movement of the book. And what reader hasn’t stopped mid-page in a book, inspired by a turn of language, and gone off on a brief reverie before returning to the tug of that book’s forward motion?

Boully’s entry in Ellis’s nonfiction anthology is “Breaking from ‘Fact’ in Essay Writing.” It doesn’t start well, by my lights, with a seeming defense of the notorious James Frey’s silly puttying various points of his biography. My problem with Frey is not his manipulation of those details but that he knowingly misrepresented himself; he played the role of a fraud, and that role then played itself out on a public stage.

Anyway, Boully soon gets down to serious business, challenging the notion that essayists must avoid invention and instead stick to an implied stricture of Who What When Where Why. “Dream-life, daydreaming-life, and the imagined-life can sometimes be experienced so profoundly that they feel real to us,” she says, in a sentence that’s as spot-on a sentence as any I’ve recently read.

I say they are real, if we think them, because, though fictions, they are what we build our lives upon. Walk down a crowded street and you’ll be surrounded by people who are not concentrating on the very important mechanics of walking, but are instead having conversations in their minds with people who aren’t present: revising a fraught conversation with a spouse from earlier that morning, anticipating an encounter with a friend later in the day, or arguing, yet again, with a deceased parent. Or those fellow travelers might be sculpting possible strategies for managing a child’s adolescent rage, or plotting out a hoped-for vacation, or digging into the details of an alternate, imagined life. So many thought bubbles, like storm clouds, hover above us.

Yet even what we acknowledge are facts have suspect borders. The “facts” of someone else’s personality–all the years of that person’s living and secret thoughts and desires–are great guesses on our part, hunches that the little we are able to see reflects the much more that we can’t. What passes for understanding of another is closer to the invention of a fictional character than we’d like to admit. As for memory, picking a fact from the past is like choosing a mirror from a hall full of them.

The world is infinite, our view is limited. Of necessity we invent and imagine–it’s the fact of our lives. Or should I say, our personal fictions are part of our nonfiction selves.

As I’ve been rambling about on my book tour for The Moon, Come to Earth, I’ve been interviewed here and there, and it does the mind good to be sharpened by questions coming at you from unexpected angles. After a good conversation, I can find myself mulling over the exchange for days afterward.

After all this chat about travel writing, I’ve been thinking about its dual nature, how the external journey is strengthened by an accompanying, echoing inner journey. Travel can be both an exhausting and exhilarating experience, one that can push us past borders of comfort we had perhaps never before recognized. The unsettling immediacy of travel heightens our awareness and encourages unexpected insight, and when one is able to lean into the strange pull of another country or culture, one’s inner landscape is correspondingly altered, the moment comes when plodding thought sprouts wings. Also, because our past travels travel with us, those overlapping inner maps can add complexity to our expectations of what we will experience.

I’ve come to the conclusion that all writing, whether non-fiction, fiction or poetry, is a type of travel writing, and that a reader experiences an imaginative or literary work as a form of travel. That experience, of course, is often interior: a journey through a narrator’s thoughts, the discovery of empathy for an initially unsympathetic character, or tracking the unfolding flight of a poem’s central metaphor. From this perspective, one could say that house-bound Emily Dickinson is one of our greatest travel writers. The best writing takes us to a place we’ve never been to before so that, on return, even if only in a small way, we return changed.

Travel isn’t simply a geographical exercise. A journey into the land of adolescence, for example, is perhaps the loneliest type of travel there is. The acceptance of one’s suppressed sexual orientation is another form of travel, from one state of personal understanding to another. The list could go on and on. And so every work of literature should offer a journey, the challenge of an interior excursion, a secret mapping that leads a reader to him or herself.

While you can’t say that all writing is actuarial table writing, or all writing is cookbook writing (well, maybe), I think it’s safe to say that all writing is travel writing.

Last week I was reading through an early draft of the critical thesis of Mayumi Shimose-Poe, one of my students at the low-res MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and one of her sentences popped off the page:

“There is a tightrope between the poles of “insider” and “outsider,” and as a fiction writer one is writing as an outsider, trying to sound like an insider.”

Now that’s an elegant way of describing the fiction writer’s task, I thought, the empathetic imagining we need to employ in order to enter the inner world of someone quite different from us. I read the sentence a few more times, proud of my student, when the thought struck me–perhaps because I’m currently finishing a non-fiction book and a novel at the same time–that something like the opposite might be said about non-fiction writers. In non-fiction, particularly memoir, one is writing as an insider, while trying to gain the emotional perspective of an outsider.

It’s a two way street, isn’t it? (Cue the obligatory image!) The fiction writer

moves from outside to inside, while the non-fiction writer moves from inside to outside.

And this movement isn’t so very different from our own daily engagement with ourselves and others throughout the day. In order to understand a friend or family member during, say, a heated conversation, it helps to imagine what he or she is thinking. Sure, this is a fictional leap, since it’s impossible to know what another human being is thinking, but entering into the possible landscape of another’s thoughts, imagining that person’s perspective, is how we make our way through life.

On the other hand, if a person becomes tidally locked in his or her inner landscape, always buying one’s self-justifications and nurturing personal wounds, an effective corrective is simply to imagine oneself from the outside, to gain some necessary and potentially revelatory emotional distance.

As in our lives, so in our writing. We seek out what is unknown to us about our characters, try to imagine complexities we then mimic on the page. And when dredging up the stuff of one’s life in a memoir, it helps to hover outside oneself, like a ghost bent on the haunting possibility of insight.

So thank you, Mayumi, for that marvelous sentence!

I’ve been on the road this past week, the first stretch of a book tour, and while I traveled by subway in New York City up to one of my reading dates, I noticed that one of those narrow posters lining the wall above the windows, which usually advertise language courses or deals on checking accounts, offered something entirely different.

This poster, apparently part of a Metropolitan Transit Authority series titled Train of Thought, displayed the first sentence from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.” And right below this quote were little ads for the Jeopardy! game show and the music station WQXR.

I was halfway to the open door for my first stop when I noticed this poster, too late to snap a photo (though later I managed to find one on flickr, of course–where else?).

For some brave soul suffering a morning commute, her eyes just barely held open by the grace of a cup of coffee, a soul perhaps unfamiliar with Kafka’s masterpiece, what might this out of context sentence suggest?

Maybe some relief that Gregor woke into something far wilder than what she can remember of her own night’s distorted dreams? A sense of temporary escape from an apartment shared with the scuttling of cockroaches? Or dread at the approaching office where she herself feels something like an insect, as if Gregor’s transformation has somehow come true for her, too?

Off that subway train continued as I remained behind on the ramp, still seeing a poster on one curved wall that might serve as a hopeful ax for someone’s frozen sea.

Most people know that all of us (plus trees, lizards, beetles, jellyfish and so on) are made from the byproducts of nuclear fusion in the cores of stars. “We are stardust,” Joni Mitchell, sang, right?

Luke McKinney, writing for The Daily Galaxy about the likelihood of scientists soon locating a “second earth” out there, mentions almost as an aside that “The majority of the atoms in our bodies were created in the Big Bang 15 billion years ago. Most of the mass in our bodies is oxygen atoms that were created by generations of stars that preceded the formation of our Sun. We are a subset of the physical universe. And through astronomy this negligible subset is slowly acquiring -however limited- an awareness of the total universe that created it.”

Oooh, not only a subset, but a negligible subset of the universe! McKinney’s pithy putting humans in their place reminds me of why I have the Astronomy Picture of the Day website tagged as my search engine’s home page. The daily image for this website, one of the first things I see each morning, usually reminds me of what a “negligible subset” I truly am. This humbling is a healthy preamble to breakfast—after roaming the center stage of my dreams all night, it’s good to feel tiny.

And how glorious is the much larger Everything Else, as can be seen in this photo of a supernova blazing away on the outskirts of a distant spiral galaxy.

How distant is distant? I’ll let Qfwfq, that engaging entity from Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, take a shot at it:

“One night I was, as usual, observing the sky with my telescope. I noticed that a sign was hanging from a galaxy a hundred-million light years away. On it was written: I SAW YOU. I made a quick calculation: the galaxy’s light had taken a hundred-million years to reach me, and since they saw up there what was taking place here a hundred-million years later, the moment when they had seen me must date back two hundred-million years.”

Here on earth, distance is more manageable, but not without its problems. G.B. Edwards, the author of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page—one of the best novels I’ve ever read—often worried about the “helicopter thinking” he saw in contemporary literature, that impulse to judge everything “from a superior height.” Get down on level ground with your characters, oh ye writers, and leave the superior heights to stars and nebulae and galaxies!

Thank you for reading this first blog posting, and while I couldn’t be more grateful for your visit, or for the technology that helped guide you here, maybe you should consider setting aside that keyboard of yours from time to time.

As Midge Raymond notes on her helpful literary blog The Writer’s Block,

I’d been cranking away at the keyboard on the same project for what felt like a very long time. And while this is a great way to get a draft down, it’s not always the most inspiring way to work – for me, anyway.

So I decided a change of scenery would do me good. I grabbed a notebook and a pen, and I vowed to stay off the computer for my next few writing sessions. I wrote in a café; I wrote at my kitchen table; I wrote on my sofa (cat in lap, notebook balanced on cat). And it did wonders.

For one, I couldn’t procrastinate by hopping online to do useless research or to see what my friends were up to on Facebook. More important, the process of handwriting slowed me down, and I did a lot of much-needed thinking about character and story. And best of all, I never got stuck, never had a moment of just staring at the screen, hands poised over the keyboard, wondering what comes next. Perhaps it was the process of slowing down, or being in more relaxed settings, which takes off the pressure that sometimes causes writer’s block.

You can read the whole post here.

What Midge Raymond says about the differences between keyboard writing and handwriting reminds me of what the great Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector once said in one of her Selected Crônicas:

“Why do I now write with my fingertips, when I used to write from the heart?”

Here’s an early photo of Lispector, working at a desk, pen in hand, nary a keyboard to be found.

If this is the way Lispector consistently wrote her books, then it might indeed be a method worth adopting, all you keyboard addicts out there. Especially when she came up with prose like this, from her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart:

“She waited near the bookcase, where she had gone to look for . . . what? She frowned, not really interested. What? She tried to derive some amusement from the impression that in the middle of her forehead there was now a gaping hole where they had extracted the notion of whatever she had gone to look for.”

Or this, from her last novel, The Hour of the Star:

“A scrawny fellow appeared on the street-corner, wearing a threadbare jacket and playing the fiddle. I should explain that, when I was a child and living in Recife, I once saw this man as dusk was falling. The shrill, prolonged sound of his playing underlined in gold the mystery of that darkened street. On the ground, beside this pitiful fellow, there was a tin can which received the rattling coins of grateful bystanders as he played the dirge of their lives. It is only now that I have come to understand. Only now has the secret meaning dawned on me: the fiddler’s music is an omen. I know that when I die, I shall hear him playing and that I shall crave for music, music, music.”

If you don’t know Clarice Lispector’s writing and these excerpts intrigue you, you should search out her work. And you might want to read Benjamin Moser’s new and impressive biography of Lispector, Why This World. Lorrie Moore has an excellent review of Moser’s book at the New York Review of Books, “The Brazilian Sphinx.”

And I’ve written my own review at The New Leader, “The Fuel of Art and Life.”

So, why not get yerself a moleskin notebook (or something less ostentatiously trendy), a pen of any persuasion, and urge new words to appear? And during those necessary breaks, you could do worse than read some Lispector.