Why Do I Write Fiction?
Agnès Madrigal
In this three-part text, the art of fiction is examined through three related perspectives, each grappling with the genre’s fundamental quandary: What constitutes reality in the first place?
I.
I write fiction because I believe there are at least two worlds—the world that exists, and another possible world (or worlds) that fluctuates around it. At every moment, there is the potential for an unexpected change, a twist, a different outcome from the one that occurs, the one that transcribes itself into empirical history, or the closest we can come to documenting such a “true story.” As a writer, I like to imagine what does not happen, but what could have happened: a man walks past a woman and trips a few steps later, for example, but what if he had tripped earlier, in front of her? My stories are usually about human interactions, ones that are similar to ones that took place; or ones that happened but with other persons, other characters, in other times and places; or ones that never occurred, except in the mind of the writer. Depending on the depth of her imagination, the mind of a writer is ever moving, shifting the reality before her wherever she goes, questioning, challenging, repositioning, and, perhaps most of all, dreaming.
A fragment from Agnès Madrigal’s notebook. Photograph by Madrigalit
II.
I found this fragment in an old notebook, examining the same question:
Why do I write fiction? I like to be a stranger. I like to remove myself. I mean this sentiment positively. I mean it in its Phoenician form, as the great mythological bird that destroyed itself to be born again, transformed. I mean it as an essential breakdown between a writer and her character, where there is no longer any distinction between the two, where the author has submerged herself, like a great actor, I suppose, in the character, or the character has become the author, taking over the narrative. It is, for the writer, akin to a line from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus,” as it is for any artist testing these boundaries: “Dying is an art like everything else.” Art is also a death. And it repeats with each new story. I find this aspect inextricable from what it means to be a writer who writes fiction.
“Depending on the depth of her imagination, the mind of a writer is ever moving, shifting the reality before her wherever she goes, questioning, challenging, repositioning, and, perhaps, most of all, dreaming.”
—Agnès Madrigal
III.
I, Agnès
But, perhaps, Agnès Madrigal is just a character, a figment of my own imagination. Maybe Agnès is merely who I had always wished to be, whoever Agnès is—one who delights in the small and the mundane, the overlooked or the under-appreciated; an eater of little foil-wrapped chocolates and a sipper of vanilla tea in a cup with a painted flower garland near the rim; a collector of small misshapen white ceramics that litter her marble-topped desk along with wayward pens, a bottle of French perfume, and a sculpted bird; an artist sometimes as she sketches in black ink pen in the margins of a notebook page. . . . But if this is Agnès, then who am I?