The other day I ran into one of my pastors downtown. He had on his headphones so I laid my hand on his shoulder in the most non-threatening way one could do. We talked for a few minutes on the sidewalk in front of a coat store, and it was the sort of interaction seemed to create its own bubble of a cloistered universe, complete with its own continuity and spans of duration. Pedestrians, concrete, and time slid around us, while we were insulated inside the urban forcefield that only made sense with itself, inside of itself. This universe contrasted with the entirety of everything else and it yields something just a little off. I only noticed it after the fact; the bubble broke and we rejoined the rest of the world.
Similarly I was tying up a chapter in the book with which I had issues — issues that every writer (or wannabe writer, in my case) encounter and require fits and starts of intense concentration intermingled with moments of brain-relaxation. All of it, though, is encapsulated in the writer’s own universe. Not the canonical universe of the fictional narrative but in the “real world”.
It helps to think of this phenomenon as the whole universe as a wheel in the sky (no, not Journey’s
) that continuously turns and humans turn in accordance with it, but we are gifted with the ability to create our own spinning circle within it — still a part of the whole grand scheming orbit of things but just a small gyroscopic reality that rotates with a separate yet complimentary meter. It’s in these little universes that writers able to assemble form and reemerge with their product. That might be the key role of fiction writers: as invisible emissaries to an alien world twice-removed from ours, where they are to track and document possibilities and outcomes from within the observatory of their own intermediary universe and report back their findings to our abeyant curiosity.