I've been asked recently what made me want to worldmake? Why, after doing extensive work in academia and non-fiction, did I stare haplessly onto a blank page and attempt an original story? I could say something like, "Karl Popper would approve." And maybe he would. World 3 certainly includes modern myth making. And I've always loved abstract thought. Why not try my hand at creating a World and reality?
Or maybe I say, "Fiction is easier." I don't have to research or defend a thesis. I don't need any primary sources or ethnographic fieldwork. I can just sit naked in my apartment and put pen to paper. What could be easier? Well that's just uninformed. I found myself doing as much research or more when I sat down with Hank Dolan and tried to make sense of New Los Angeles.
No, the truth is: I made a work of fiction because I was compelled to do so. It was a compulsion. I've always been fascinated with myth and folklore. Fiction gave me the opportunity to be a mythologist and arm chair psychologist. This is Sadie Fuller. What would Sadie Fuller do in this circumstance? What would she say? How would she say it? Writing fiction gave me a chance to explore colorful philosophical positions and see how they might play out in certain settings. It was a way to test my own beliefs and thought processes by imagining interactions with people who hold differing viewpoints.
Am I saying that constructing a dialogue between the Greek Dionysus and Egyptian Set is the same, or even in the same ballpark, as Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre, sitting at a hazy French cafe, chain smoking and pouring liquor down their throats, while bickering like dogs about
what it means to be free. Yes. To me, it was exactly like that. I found it fascinating to ask myself, given the differences in culture and context, what kind of conversation would these deities have. I imagined them despising each other.
Fiction was a vehicle to play out scenarios in my mind that found interesting. Writing the story was a form of thought experiment. Maybe that was the main reason why I wrote a book of fiction. I can't really say, with any concrete certainty. I will say that once it got going, once the words began to fill the paper and page one became ten and then thirty and then a hundred, that inertia took over. By the time Act II rolled around, I was stuck on the train and it was gonna be finished come hell or high water.
The most honest answer about 'why fiction' though, at least for me, is that it became immensely enjoyable. I loved the process. It was delightful, and fun, and grueling, and awful. It was an addiction that Sadie Fuller would certainly relate to. Fiction is all these things and more. Perhaps we see ourselves in our characters. Or we see what we'd like to be. Fiction affords a purity of worldview- we're able to salvage the debris that floats around in our minds and construct a reality where it is useful. It's a zenful experience. Both a meditative experience and creative outlet.
I often ask myself what would my writing look like now had I taken on creative writing as an area of study in college. Would my fiction writing be better? More stylized? I want to say that the content would be completely different. There's a reason why myth and folklore permeate my book. Perhaps the content is my core interest and I'd have ended up writing about deitic interaction even without the background of academic writing. That's the conundrum of fiction. It's a mystery unto itself. It's a beautiful mystery, full of soaring highs and god awful troughs, but the process is unlike anything else.
