I was talking to a reporter the other day and she asked me if I thought my studies in philosophy had affected my writing, shaped the forms I chose to write in. I told her that I didn’t separate knowledge into genres or categories because it seemed to me that all of us were probing the same mystery, coming at it from different angles, calling it different things, but all asking the same questions endlessly. Who am I? Why am I here? What are we doing? Is there free will and, if so, how much, and who has it? The scientist and philosopher René Dubos explores these questions with great intelligence and humor. On free will he quotes Samuel Johnson, who said, “All scientific knowledge is against free will, all common sense for it.”

I do not understand why I write fiction when the main things I read are books about science and philosophy. Perhaps I think that by exploring character and event I can create actors to act out the questions I am always asking. I have a character named Nora Jane Whittington who lives in Berkeley, California, and who has so much free will that I can’t even find out from her whether the twin baby girls she is carrying belong to her old boyfriend, Sandy, or her new boyfriend, Freddy Harwood. I can’t finish my new book of stories until Nora Jane agrees to an amniocentesis. She is afraid the needle will penetrate the placenta and frighten the babies.

I created Nora Jane but I have to wait on her to make up her mind before I can finish the title story of my new book. This is a fiction writer’s life. Fortunately, I am going to be in California soon and I will drive up to Berkeley and walk around some of Nora Jane’s old hangouts. By the time I get home maybe I’ll know what to write.

—Ellen Gilchrist

Transcribed by me from pages 103–104 of my first edition hardback copy of Falling Through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist, ©1987 Little, Brown & Company. (The book was revised with fifteen additional essays and rereleased in 2000 by University Press of Mississippi.)

Tweet: The mysteries of fiction writing, revealed.
Tweet: Patience! Characters reveal themselves & their motivation in time.
Tweet: All of us are probing the same mystery. Who am I? Why am I here? What are we doing?

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