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If It's Like Being Pursued by a Train, Why Do We Persist? by Julie Ellen Orringer, author of How to Breathe Underwater As a child, I loved anything that involved a secret. I wrote in a journal labeled Secret Diary, my favorite book was The Secret Garden, and my brother and sister and I spoke a secret language. In our house in New Orleans I had a balcony outside my bedroom window, and at night I would secretly climb out onto that balcony and shine my flashlight through the windshields of passing cars, imagining I might discover something about the people inside. I loved nighttime, especially those hours after everyone else had gone to bed. Oftentimes, when the house was dark and silent, what I wanted to do was write. I filled journal after journal with shocking stories I showed to nobody and later destroyed by stuffing them down a storm drain at the end of our block. What I retained was that feeling of concealment, that sense of the story as something you could carry with you invisibly through your waking hours. You could be writing it in your mind as you ate, as you rode your bike, as you sat through algebra at school—and no one would know, no one could tell. Of course, the tension of a secret comes not from the fact that it's concealed, but from the fact that it might be revealed. And that seems true of stories as well—part of the excitement of that early stage, with its attendant secrecy, is that eventually the secret must be told. Someday, there must be a reader. Not every story can be stuffed down a storm drain, not if the writer wants to make a living of it. For me, a story might begin with a line or an image or a memory: A glass of red water. A girl dancing between grapevines. My mother's voice. I carry that line or image or memory around in my mind until the story begins to crystallize around it. I write a draft, read it, write notes all over it, write another draft. Gradually the story's shape begins to emerge. I revise the story, show it to other writers, write further drafts. Still, I often feel as if the real story is eluding me, as if the draft in front of me is light-years distant from that first idea, that early luminous secret. In her essay "What is Real?", Alice Munro writes, "Even when I say that I see where I went wrong, I'm being misleading.... Every final draft, every published story, is still only an attempt, an approach, to the story." Perhaps part of the attraction, then, is that the story never really reveals itself—that it remains elusive. For some reason it seems important to chase it, to find what's hidden. "You experience a story within yourself from its beginning, from the distant point up to the approaching locomotive of steel, coal, and steam, and you don't abandon it even now, but want to be pursued by it and have time for it, therefore are pursued by it and of your own volition run before it wherever it may thrust and wherever you may lure it." This is what Kafka writes in his diary. But if it's so difficult, if it's like being pursued by a train, why do we persist? Maybe it's because we can't stop. How could we stop, when writing holds the possibility of revealing something about the mystery of other human lives, and of our own? That mystery, I think, is the larger secret, the one that drew us to books in the first place, the one that continues to speak to us quietly in the dark.
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