« The word narrative means « to know. » The reader enters the narrative to know. The character enters the narrative to know. The writers enters the narrative to know. The pressure of not knowing and wanting to know is the pressure to write, to proceed to knowledge; but it is also the pressure to read, and as well the pressure to live and breathe as a character on the page. The shared experience among writer, reader, and character is that process of discovery. If any of the participants in the process has already discovered whatever there is to be discovered, then why bother? […]
Readers suspend disbelief and writers suspend disbelief because writing and reading are acts of faith along the path to knowledge, not just one particular knowledge but any knowledge that is part of the essential truths lurking to be shared by the reader and the writer and all those people in that story, that are coming not to just once conclusions but many conclusions, that follow not one path but many paths, because the writing and the story are not just about one thing but many things, and in this essential multifarious way writing is an embrace of all the complexity of not knowing and wanting to know and getting to know and all the contradictions that reside therein, and that has been our task, on these paths, all of us – writer, reader, character – to embrace those contradictions. »
Fred G. Leebron, from the essay Not Knowing in The Eleventh Draft, Craft and the Writing Life From The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, edited bt Frank Conroy.
