Fictions
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: “Did Not Start.” The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Every once in a while, I doubt my prospects as a novelist.
My book is about the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. His story—in all its historical and hagiographic and mythological permutations—has followed me from the earliest days of my childhood in the church he made.
Ten months ago, originating this newsletter, I offered a definition of creativity that I’ve been thinking about as I labor away in my project’s third year:
Creativity is our, sometimes incredibly surprising, capacity to gain control of the narrative, to shift the terms of whatever confrontation we’re in the middle of so that our intrinsic or cultivated advantages become decisive.
Since then, I’ve laid out many strands of the relationship between creative work and athletics: the tricks we play on ourselves to overpower our resistance; the improvisatory power of yes, and; the conjuring effects of all those woo-woo beliefs we hold without clear evidence. In “Invention,” I extended my thesis: “All action, all thought, all experience, all purpose, all relationship, and all creation are the work of the body.” Through our bodies we effectuate our beliefs; through our bodies their truth is reinforced, rebutted, and in many cases formed.
Joseph’s life is exhaustively documented, including by his own hand, and yet he is an enigma: Who was this person who persuaded so many that he was a prophet, and what did he believe? Until I started writing his story, I didn’t know in detail what my opinion would be. Then I began to construct a narrative of my own, both factual and, because we can’t see his interior life, imagined—and first understood the self-reinforcing power of what I’d produced. Increasingly, I find it hard to understand him, or his reverberance through history, in any terms other than the ones I’ve set.
Like most of us, Joseph probably believed his own convictions in some moments and doubted them in others. He was certainly a trickster and an opportunist, the species of showman who bothers to disguise only some of his lies. America brims with these types, but few spawn a sub-civilization. I don’t think that hallucinating as we would construe it played much of a role in Joseph’s outlook, though fantasy certainly did. But I also don’t think he thought he was making it all up. “We are a visionary house,” said Joseph’s older brother to a visitor in 1829. “Behold, I have dreamed a dream; or, in other words, I have seen a vision,” says his patriarch Lehi in the earliest pages of the Book of Mormon, a work of religious fiction composed at the same time and promulgated as scripture. Joseph’s milieu was a state of revelation; his reality was permeable and loose. What he wrote acquired its own force, including over him.
This relates back to that definition of creativity, which centers adversity, because nothing in my past suggests I can write a viable historical novel, let alone with a subject so elusive. I’m a journalist, which in the shops I’ve worked at meant keeping a close orbit to witnessed fact. Moreover, my job was editing, policing accuracy and precision. I’m not even a historian. I’m just a short-form nonfiction writer writing long-form fiction about a fictionist who called his work history. Hence my occasional doubts.
But there it is: You can’t get to the fundamental truth of this story with facts alone, because the crucial ones never left the privacy of its subject’s brain. Joseph Smith, like other influential charismatics living and dead, crafted a narrative whose power was independent of its veracity. How he did this—where he derived his stories, how his charm could transcend physical proximity, why he managed for so long to live in open defiance of both the law and basic social norms, and especially how he persuaded his followers that they too had seen his divine phenomena—all of it begs for imaginative treatment. I really believe the only way to understand his story is to make one up, big and human and weird enough to gesture at the truth.
To write a novel is a double action: You create one story about your characters, and one about yourself. And the 1830s may seem distant, but none of this is trivial. We live in an age no different from any other, in which belief is the precursor to everything.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.