Richard Seltzer's Blog: Richard Seltzer, page 16

Time Travel and Religion

(from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)

Time travel/dislocation is one tool for the novelist. It is not intended to be realistic, only plausible. Used well, it can be very effective.

I begin with basic unanswerable questions -- what, if anything, comes before life; and what, if anything, comes after. Add to that the mystery that in some sense we remain the same person ro same identity as our body changes radically over the years. Normal life is magic -- slow magic, the changes happening so slowly that we don't notice them until we meet someone we haven't seen in years or some event shakes us enough so we see our selves in the mirror with fresh eyes. When those same changes happen rapidly, that's "fast magic."
In Nevermind, a couple meet, fall in love, marry, and soon after divorce back during and shortly after WW II. By chance they meet agin 40 years later on a cruise ship and fall for each other again, before they realize who they are.
In Beyond the Fourth Door, two people wake up 40 years older than they were when they fall asleep. They have no memory of what happened during that 40 years, but to those around them they have led normal lives. it isn't a case of amnesia. It happened to both of them separately. And it turns out that they had been in love but had broken up back in college.
In part 1 of Breeze, a college girl suddenly goes into a coma and her lover/boyfriend tries to cope with the aftermath. In part 2, that same girl wakes up in the body of Briseis in the Trojan War (the story, not the historical Troy). In part 3, she wakes up at the Eleusinian Mysteries as part of a mix-up in an attempt at a kind of deliberate soul transference.
You could say that those three novels explore the same mysteries of life from different, perspectives.
While I don't put faith in any of the tenets of any religion, my books are all attempts to make sense of life and death and the universe.

Why I Write

(from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)

Why I Write
1
When asked as a child whether I would like to become a doctor since doctors save lives, I replied that we all die; doctors just postpone that. What matters is to have a reason for living. I wanted to become an author because authors can help people realize what they can and should do with their lives.
2
How could Shakespeare have written so well about the murder of kings? Was that how he thought? Should Queen Elizabeth have considered him a threat?
Dostoyevsky read a newspaper story about a murder and imaginatively understood how such a person might think and why such a person might do such things. He could hear in his head how such a person might speak and justify himself. Without ever having acted in such a way, he could write Crime and Punishment.
The capacity for understanding people who are very different from ourselves allows authors to write and readers to enjoy such stories and allows actors to portray many different kinds of characters.
Thanks to this ability writers, readers, and actors experience multiple lives -- not just the one that they live. And the insight and empathy gained from those vicarious experiences makes their actual experience of life richer and more complete, bringing them closer to the people they know and love, because they can more fully appreciate what others are feeling and thinking. That's the primary reason why I write.
Regardless of whether characters in some way resemble me or people I have known, what matters to me is the experience of creating characters who come alive in my imagination such that I can hear them speak and see them act in ways that I would not have expected.
3
Stories are born, not made. Some characters and plots come to life, and grow and change. Others remain static.
For an author, the experience of bringing a character to life is similar to becoming fluent in a foreign language. When you immerse yourself in a language, you can reach a point when you start to dream in it. And when you develop your characters to a critical point, you start to dream what they say and what they do. You hear their words and see their action, and the story takes on a life of its own.
3
I write and read fiction for the enriching experience of living many times.
Only in the worst novels do the authors control and manipulate their characters.
Rather characters come alive and determine their own destiny, despite the author's well-meaning plans for them.
Writing such a book is a delightful adventure of discovery.
6
When I create characters and scenes, I am performing thought-experiments (a la Einstein). If I put these characters together under these circumstances, what is likely to happen and why and how does that affect my notions of human nature and destiny. That is why I write and enjoy writing, regardless of whether I ever have an audience.
7
The novels I write are memoirs of lives I haven't lived yet.

8
There are many people write because they enjoy the experience of writing, the sense of accomplishment they get from finishing a novel, the insights that gives them.
Many people run marathons and enjoy doing so even though they have no expectation of ever "winning".
I'm reminded of a book by Jane Smiley 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel which provides lots of helpful advice about the process of writing novels, and conveys much of the pleasure of just doing it.
It's great if you have the temperament and the time to both write and market. But for many the marketing is a bridge too far.