“Every book has an intrinsic impossibility.” ~ Annie Dillard.

I don’t mean to ruin your day.  Quite the opposite. 

As a reader, I’m drawn to the impossible dilemma.  As a writer, I’m pumped by the prospect of accomplishing the impossible.  In her little book, “The Writing Life”, Ms. Dillard suggests that every novelist asks two questions: Can it be done? and Can I do it?

The appropriate answer is ‘no’.

At the level of “story”, it’s the hero who confronts the impossible.  The powers of antagonism compel us if they appear insurmountable.  Writers generally understand this.  But Dillard is more concerned with a worse impossibility facing the writer. 

The problem of story structure:

“…it is insoluble,” says Dillard, “it is why no one can ever write this book.”

Ernest Hemingway acknowledged that “writing well is impossibly difficult.”  His advice for the would-be writer was to “go out and hang himself”.  Then…

“…he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life.  At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.”

Launching a tale is rarely the writer’s problem.  But soon the plot sags for want of a protagonist with momentum—to say nothing of her reaching a meaningful conclusion.  The writer swears that the original idea literally oozed meaning.

So, what went wrong? 

In her beloved little book, Dillard suggests that the writer typically discovers the “structural defect” and then “wishes he had never noticed”. 

“He finds ways to minimize the difficulty; he strengthens other virtues; he cantilevers the whole narrative out into thin air, and it holds.  And if it can be done, he can do it, and only he.” 

Dillard loves the notion of the writer doggedly intuiting his way toward truth.  Farther and farther out on that limb, you can hear the bough cracking…I’ve been there!  It’s an impossible situation.  I love it.

Dillard befriends the impossible because there’s no alternative to it.  Nothing can rescue the writer.  No writer has ever faced this particular challenge before:

“There is nothing in the material for this book that suggests to anyone but him alone its possibilities for meaning and feeling.” 

Dillard would appear to suggest that no laws of fiction exist to guide the writer.  Then, on the next page, she contradicts herself.  She tells us where the mother lode of story truth lies:

In “…that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly as creatures set down here bewildered.” 

Story structure exists solely to serve “that power”.  The power of awakening.  It arises out of loss and disillusionment, and it “seizes” the protagonist and “reveals” to her the truth of her existence.  Dillard calls the human condition “bewildered”.  

“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? 

Toward that awakening—however it manifests in the protagonist—that’s where every writer (cantilevering the plot til it breaks) needs to force their hero. 

Ruthless, maybe.  Tragic, sometimes.  Impossible, it only seems that way at the start.

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