Going into the Story

A few weeks ago I talked about an e-mail I received from Maia. She was responding to a young novella of mine called The Very Little Princess. And she said she "wanted to go into the story."

We all recognize reading that way. How often have I looked up from reading a novel set in a warm, sunny clime to be surprised at the snow outside my window? (No longer, thank goodness. Our intractable Minnesota winter has finally melted away.) Or found myself feeling uncomfortably guilty from inside someone else's badly behaved character? Or had to give myself a shake when I set a book aside before I could return to the present and the dinner waiting to be prepared?

I remember reading that way most intensively as a child, swallowing books whole and then emerging, dazed, into my own small world, which, curiously enough, was still waiting for me.

I heard a description once of a toddler who, on being read Goodnight Moon, set the book on the floor and stepped on it, clearly trying to enter that green room. The child burst into tears when she found she couldn't climb into Margaret Wise Brown's world that way.

What is the point of giving over our psyches to stories? When we read, when we write, are we simply escaping the Minnesota snow or the narrow constrictions—perhaps even the ethical ones—of our own lives? Certainly that's part of what we're doing. But escape, while it has a bad name—literature labeled "escapist" is certainly not held in high regard—is surely the first step toward something much larger.

It depends on what we escape into. Something that enlarges our view of the world, of ourselves? Something that enlarges our hearts?

I once read about a man who said, "I don't like music. I don't want other people putting their emotions into me."

First, I was stunned that it is possible for anyone not to like music—all music—in a generic way. Second, I wondered why experiencing others' emotions might be so threatening.

We are community creatures. Solitary confinement is the worst punishment that can be visited upon us. We actually need to feel not just our own fear and lust and tenderness and boredom but our neighbor's, too.

Obviously, we do that by living among other human beings. But we can extend our experience, our empathy, our understanding by going into the story, too, experiencing other people's stories, by experiencing art of all kinds.

It's what we writers of fiction do every day we sit down to work. We move inside someone else's world, experience someone else's feelings. If our stories are effective, it's what our readers do, too.

What a privilege it is to create worlds for others to inhabit.

What satisfaction there is in expanding our own consciousness through building new worlds for ourselves.

Still, I wonder sometimes. What becomes of a life that is spent inhabiting imaginary others? Would it be better, somehow, to be crafting cabinets or tilling a garden? In these long hours I spend intertwined in story, am I escaping my own life?

Oh . . . you were expecting an answer? Sorry. I don't have one. Only the question, followed immediately by the urge to return to the latest world I've created.