To write fiction, you must make yourself holy.  This is how.  Immerse your heart in the dirty world.  Crawl in its decay.  Shout out its meager glories.  Then leave.  Then write.  Then put down your pen and make dinner.

It’s an odd pastime, fiction writing.  First you must know the world intimately.  Then you must love the world abstractly and at a distance, like something divine.  It’s only the distance that matters.  It’s always the distance.  And the experience. That is all.

You are reading a post from Matter Notes, Karen Michalson’s blog on creativity as spirituality and the war on the humanities. Her most recent novel, The Maenad’s God, is available on Amazon.

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