Why I write what I write.
It is not that I ‘write what I know,’ but that I write what I need to know. It is not that I write what I have seen, but what I need to see. I write, not what I have learnt, but what I need to learn. I write, not what I have understood, but what I need to understand about the world and my place in it.
When I write, I am moved to do so by one overwhelming desire: to unravel or unearth some great truth about the human condition. Sometimes I think that my writing of fiction is more a philosophical pursuit than a literary one, though logos and syntax play as fundamental a role in my writing as the ideas that need them in order to be written, and finally, to be read.
Take, for example, my first novel, PALIMPSEST, forthcoming in March. This is a story about a daughter and her father, both philosophers; the former an academic, the latter an autodidact. The father is found dead when my story begins and the daughter travels to her father’s village in Greece to bury him. There she learns that her father’s noble ambition to become a philosopher has devolved into a dark, fanatic plan to restore the life and traditions of the ancient city of Zelopolis. Her father’s dream was not, as one might expect of the philosopher, to attain the world’s knowledge, but to rewrite it to suit his vision of how his world should have been. Not philosophy at all.
In the blurb that will appear on the back of the book’s cover, I describe PALIMPSEST as a “story about high ideals and low obsessions; about what we believe and what happens when belief degenerates into fanaticism.”
They say that an author’s first novel is autobiography disguised as fiction. Yes, everything in my novel is true - but nothing is fact. Everything is fiction. For the moment an author begins to write, everything changes. I began writing with many things that I knew, but continued writing towards the things that I did not know, the things I needed to know. I soon understood that the novelist is no lover of facts; the novelist is a lover of truth.
I invented many things in this novel - I invented a village in Greece; I invented an ancient Greek philosopher; I invented an ancient Greek demigod; I invented a father and a daughter; I invented an entire story. And the more I invented, the closer I got to the truth. It seemed I was digging more than writing; excavating more than composing and all the while I discovered that the story I was writing - by virtue of being invention, a type of spectacle exposed - it was this thing that was able to reveal what I wanted to see and learn and, finally, understand. In the novel, for example, I wanted to understand how the virtue of philosophy, of wanting to gain wisdom, could devolve into its opposite: ignorance, confusion, fanaticism.
I’ve met - and in some cases known quite intimately - numerous real, factual persons who’d, somehow, read and sought knowledge only to become selective scholars, selectively receiving information about the world, selectively believing some truths about the world and denying others. And it was this that I wanted, not to record simply as fact, but to write as a way of understanding why it was so.
To this end, my knowledge of the English language and of its syntax was brought into the spectacle. Until finally, I was able to give words to the truth I wanted to discover.
My writing always begins with a very personal motivation. It is that one overwhelming desire I mentioned above: the desire to understand the truth about the human condition. But, by relinquishing the facts and inventing the spectacle of a story, I hope to transform my personal motivation into a universal one, one that might devastate a reader so much so that they will be unable to do anything else until they have read right through to the end of it.
02.12.10 
Philosophy, Palimpsest, Kathryn Koromilas, Novel, writing, truth 
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