Falling into Fiction
I spotted an odd frame, floating on the canal.
It wasn’t a frame—it was a book.
Walking in the park in the middle of the day, I crept in for a closer look. A black sketchbook, personalized with a street-art graphic look. Leaning over the edge, I got my foot wet, but I managed to reach it. Soaking wet, it almost tore apart as I gripped it carefully in the tips of my fingers.
I laid it out against the grass. The high-noon sun was beating hard, and I figured it would dry out if I just left it there. Instead, I found a bench by the basketball courtyard and sat on top of it. I took a photo. Then another. Even soaked through, I could see the pages were replete with original artwork—graffiti styling, colorful street art, and, on the last page, handwritten notes wrapped around small drawings.
A teen’s sketchbook? I wondered.
“A teen’s sketchbook? I wondered.”
I decided to get out of the sun and continue my walk, planning to check on it later. Maybe it’d be dry enough to inspect properly. I took two more photos—one of the front cover, one of both covers together. It was a cool thing. Some lone artist’s tossed work, or a bully’s handiwork. Either way, it felt like a discovery.
I never figured a few damned kids would chance on it and tear its pages off, littering the grass.
So much for that. Fucking teen art-critics in the making.
“There is nothing closer to this but dancing with the gods.”
I was getting ready to interview an up-and-coming writer, and that chance experience—the book, the ruin, the loss—propelled the features whereby an artist develops from the background of my mind to the foreground of the dialogue. What was that kid doing? A budding artist who’d already given up?
After all, what is an artist, any kind, if not preoccupied with engaging the outer world with inner dimensions—transforming it through experience and intent of craft, character, voice, reason, and artistry?
The interview launched with my supposition, very soon thwarted, that we’d discuss genre, historical fiction in particular. But happily, we veered into the territories beneath any writer’s artistic geography—the map we dare not look into all that often.
When we do, we discover our fears, our solitude, our imagination is not cut off from humanity but very much part of a nexus. A yearn of longings. Hopes. Terror. But just as often, shining hope. Aspiration.
“A sincere desire to commune with our civilization—to land that publishing deal, to exhibit our work.”
A sincere desire to commune with our civilization, to land that publishing deal, to exhibit our work. It’s seldom for admiration. It’s more selfless than that—or altogether too far gone to even conceive of much of that.
As the interview went on, we covered familiar ground: what we know of the industry, how its changes thwart and terrify us, and the unfamiliar—the artwork that inspires us, the way we craft stories, techniques picked up along the way.
And this—this is what keeps us going: a reckoning with a way of life. The writer’s life, which is neither balanced nor chaotic, but exists as a kind of harmony between compulsion and utter dedication.
To some, it’s a hard life.
To others—to those who live reinventing this world and creating new ones—there is nothing closer to this but dancing with the gods.
| About the author:
Robert Cavaliere is a novelist by trade, his work—rooted in the neon glow of gritty cities—charts character-driven journeys through the noise of modern life.
