I am reading around lately on the wisdom from experts, ways to craft good fiction, free of cliches, clumsy cadence, the importance of showing and not telling, etc.. As a student you have to be careful with your time, though. Else you end up blowing it all in lecture. I have my favorite bits. One powerful idea I’m especially fond of, one I’ve been aware of for quite some time now, and one consistent with the epistemic view that we, all of us, are fully determined Experience Machines (and not the author of our thoughts and actions), is this idea that a writer, pen in hand, is nothing more than a physical instrument rendering the words on the page. In essence, a writer is merely the vessel for telling a story, one that comes to her almost like a vision, unbidden. I read things like, “Get out of the way of your characters – let them tell their story!”; or, “The best crafted stories end up being very different from what the author intended when she started out.” The wisdom here, metaphorically given, is that if you try too hard to tell the story yourself, you (the writer) and your characters will wind up trapped inside your head. I like this advice but I’m not sure I regard it as only metaphorical, even though the experts likely do. To me it’s possibly quite literal. In a very real sense, if we are not the conductors of our own thoughts (stories), or able to will our own actions (writing), then of course it’s impossible to mute a character’s true voice, or in a real way pen words any other than what the brain precisely instructs the hand to pen. On this view then, alone at her desk, pencil in hand resting lightly on a blank sheet of paper, the writer has no alternative but to wait for the story to express itself, through her. There’s an insanity to this view, of course. It’s sort of like when you were a kid, with your hand resting gently on the Ouija Board puck, and that terrifying wait for the puck to move the hand.