Anna DeForest on Writing Without Artifice

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

Years ago, I took a test called the Sackheim-Gur, an assessment that measures a person’s tendency towards self-deception. I did already suspect there was something wrong with me, but I was young enough that the contours of the problem remained vague, showing up as a general failure to routinely perform the large and small tasks of daily living. I was young enough to not yet notice that most of my deficiencies came with reciprocal strengths. The Sackheim-Gur consists of twenty questions, mostly regarding subjects considered taboo or abject. For example:

– Have you ever hated your parents?
– Have you ever enjoyed your bowel movements?
– Have you ever been uncertain as to whether or not you were a homosexual?

Subsequent studies show a positive correlation between Sackheim-Gur scores and the Beck Depression index, which indicates that lying to yourself is probably a necessary part of maintaining something like happiness. Of note, I scored near-perfect on the test, meaning I am a hateful deviant who relishes the pleasures of the body, and I won’t lie about it—at least not to myself.

Storytellers are supposed to be liars; someone somewhere told me that. But I have never been one to tell stories, either. As a child growing up alongside many brothers, I did not like to stand out. When they would run from me (I was told to be a girl), I would run after until they beat me just to make me go away. But some early mornings I would be allowed in their shared bed, where the oldest of them would tell us his dreams, each thrilling and fantastic with through-lines and recurring plots, lacking completely in the strange logic and opaque symbols with which the subconscious tries to signal us. I mean, he made them up. I did not know at the time why I knew that all his dreams were lies. What does the truth sound like?

I am meant to tell you about writing fiction, and instead I am telling you about lies. Writing, how I do it, is not inventive or imaginary, it is merely a means of paying attention. We live in a world of unreality and dreams, Simone Weil said. To give up our imaginary place at the center means to awaken to what is real.

I recently learned that Cormac McCarthy published one essay in his lifetime, an essay about the origins of language. Using the lens of dreams, he describes a tension between the mind we know and live with, the conscious mind, and the unconscious mind from which the surface mind seems to arise. When you say, Let me see, how can I put this, what exactly is the this which you are trying to put? How can it be said to exist? And where? The same assertion comes from the mouth of Alicia Western, the patient in the doctor-patient dyad that composes Stella Maris, the last novel McCarthy published before he died. Can he be said to exist now, and if so, where?

To know what you cannot know, you have to see what you cannot see. You are in possession of a brain, a perceptual device which works hard by design to make sure you stay the same person you were yesterday. Most of all, it will show you what you have already seen, and tell you things that you believe already. In the common language you feed to it, your dominant hemisphere chatters endlessly, barely listening to itself. So to learn to see, you learn to see beyond what the mind tries to show you, and to learn to speak, you learn to listen below the common language, to find instead, as Jack Gilbert called it, the fresh particularity of difference.

The writing I admire and aim to produce works in a language that is entirely without artifice. This means, to be direct, short blunt words without flourish, minimal description, limited internality, and a lot of direct observation of the external world. I prefer to write in the first person, for the same reason, an atheist stance—there is no one outside of the story, there is no place outside from which to tell it. The narrator is only a person desperate for a voice, desperate to name experience, to bring our vast amorphous perceptions under that pretense of control we only get from language. Something clear to anyone with eyes in their head is that the world is at heart unknown and unknowable, mostly unsayable—and still the writer’s task is to try and try to approach this place to which you know you will never arrive. None of this, you might note, is invention. There is nothing to make up.

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Our Long Marvelous Dying by Anna DeForest is available now via Little, Brown. Featured Image: “Woman before a Mirror,” Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, via the Met Museum.