second round of answers

to the question:  what can fiction do?

Matias Viegener says:
• writing now can help you get on the spaceship when it offers you a ride
• writing now could keep you in touch with your friends
• writing now might prevent you from believing your entire family is evil
• with writing now you can cook for yourself, and really well when you want
• writing now can make you forget how to shop but remember to feed the birds
• writing now could sit naked in the sun
• writing now could have flaws
• writing now could be cuddly
• writing now likes to think, but also knows when to stop
• writing now sings out loud in the car

Vanessa Place says: All art is writing, and all writing paper, it can be cut up but not in, it covers and coats and turns all things into their own image, a thing to be read as is.

Davis Scheiderman says: What shouldn’t writing do is perhaps a more germane question if writing mainly gets us—in the form of the most obsequious best-seller—only more of the same hum-drum mediocrity of the spirit, dead-eyed keno zombies mugging their way through the Shop N’ Save in search of Tostitos, cheap soda, and maybe on a whim at Wal-Mart, or Sam’s Club, some dime-store book about the good within us all, et al.  Why write at all about anything, really, if living in American is so damn, well, like being the butt-end of some data-mining target marketing campaign that plays and plays and reads itself into the uneasy sleep of an over-stimulated 10-month old rubbing her eyes, right now, jet-lagged from a cross-continental air trip from China where she was just adopted, and ready to spring back into action at any moment.  Why write? For her of course.  And what shouldn’t writing do? Make her world smaller with every word. Baby, I say starting now, we’ve got a long way to go.

the answers

the question:  what can fiction “do?”

the answers so far:

andrei codrescu says: Writing should get you free into whatever you choose to watch, it should give you a feeling of “weight” when you walk around, it should make people soft and hard, it should keep playing in your head long after it’s written/read, and it should be swift and consensual.

rosalyn drexler says:  Why put writing on the spot? It was not created to do anything. It came along, Hey, I’m here. Let me be. Solve your own problems. Give money. Give love. Give directions. But don’t give me away. I am writing. Hear me shout! Oh, am I whispering? Too bad. Listen harder. I’m only repeating what others have told me. Everybody know everything already. I am writing. I am here on the page: an exercise of where words go to die. Sometimes I’m just a shopping list. Won’t let you forget what you came for. You asked what writing can do just now…just now? What do you imply? Is this a call to arms? Words unite! Fight the evil that scrawls itself across the world. It doesn’t matter does it? There are always more words to go around. However…a big however…discarded words edited tenderly from a body of work can still be useful: imagine a necklace of words: decorative, meaningful, hardly momentous but lovely to look at. What should it be doing? Saving the world? Poor, poor words; has nobody noticed the haphazard way they are strung together, yet manage not to strangle the neck they encircle. Is it the neck of the world? A doomed world, unadorned, bleeding, corrupt, bare, bare…wanting a warm scarf in winter…a cool breeze in summer…and when lonely the world wants a kiss not a word. In this situation what should writing do? Write about a kiss? Why yes. A kiss in its infinite variety. Writing helps one to recall a kiss, THE  kiss. That is where memory of a KISS or a PISS or a  MISS remains; right there in writing. So what. When writing is doing its best it forgets that someone, some writer is writing it into being. It is (almost) there in everyone.  It is a possibility…waiting.
I’ve heard writers say that they write to live and that they live to write. BULLSHIT. It is just one choice out of many. It might be explained in one sentence, or a slogan, or any form you choose, this urge to write…but as Lady Day implored (after being wronged by a lover) in song, “Don’t explain.”

brian evenson says:  I don’t think that writing should be doing anything in particular, but I do think it should be “doing.”  It’s easy for writing to slip into old tired patterns where it doesn’t have to “do”, where it’s follow the same groove in the same record, where it’s covering the same tired ground, where it’s one of the millions of cars on the same superhighway, inching along with everyone else.  How much better if the writing is traveling down disused back roads getting knocked by branches and trying to make it around places where the road has been washed out.  Or threading itself thinly down an animal track.  Or hacking its way deep into the thicket of being without having decided in advance what it’ll find there.  The more effort, the better….

Howard Junker says: Writing does nothing except supply words. Writers should try to tell the truth, which is not easy when asked a question that turns out to
be three questions. The best time for writing is when you need
something to read.

Lidia Yuknavitch says:  It should break the back of language in its truths, then softly heal her, cradle her, sing her back to life.