A young woman decided to become a writer, but she lacked imagination so she wrote the world.

A young woman decided to become a writer, but she lacked imagination so she wrote the world.

She woke up each morning and wrote what she saw out her window. Not in any scientific way, just wrote the sentences in her head. Grey sidewalk reflected in ground floor window, Man sets e-watch for run, Blue and purple towel under tree. Making no claim to a universal truth about the world, just a claim to her gaze.

She knew that this was not the way she was supposed to write a novel. Novels were inspired by life, but they were not life, that's what made them novels. A lot of people read to escape life, to be put under a fictive spell and live in the world of the book rather than their own. This is why people are called "book worms", because they live in a book, eating its paper and glue. This is why overly romantic people sometimes reminded, "Life isn't a fairy tale! Life is hard and there are few happy endings!"

But what if someone wrote a novel that wasn't separate from life at all. The young writer didn’t want to transform real people into fictional characters. She didn't want to write about places she couldn't see. She wanted to transcribe realness onto the page, preserve it as best she could.

How could she make up fictional characters who were more interesting than the real characters that surrounded her, the characters God had created. How could she ever come up with conversations as interesting and funny as the ones she overheard on the streets.

Two teenage girls walking down the street eating hard candy on sticks. One casually asks the other “What does ‘pity’ mean?”

She loved the world much more than her imagination, although it was never clear to her where her imagination ended and reality began. Had the girl said “pity” or some other word like bitty, pretty or diddy? She would never know.

Was what she was creative writing? Or was it just copying, navel gazing? Was she creating new if she was just writing words about something that already existed?

She thought back to stories she had written in her creative writing classes in college and high school. The whole point had been to imagine the reality of someone other than herself and write a story from their perspective. When she was 16, she had written a story from the perspective of Imelda, a woman who cleaned airport bathrooms. She found the story. How patronizing it sounded!

She felt the most awake in the mornings. The small, Denver airport was empty and open. She took her last sip of coffee before going through security. They made her throw out her liquids too. Her son had bought her a new coffee maker for mother’s day. Its small metal spout on the side shot out steam that whistled like strong wind through a closed window.

What had she been trying to do by writing as Imelda? Had she thought it as an act of empathy? Probably. But, of course, she had no idea what it would be like to be an immigrant woman named Imelda who cleaned airport bathrooms. She had no idea what it would be like to have a son. She had never even been to Denver or its airport.

She was trapped. Writing as herself felt self indulgent and writing as others felt patronizing. Did this mean she shouldn’t write at all? Could anyone write as anyone else?