we can only write toward our obsessions

A photograph taken in the Santa Croce Cathedral, October 2012, while researching the book that would become One Thing Stolen.

To the left, the mosaics of colored glass tell us stories, suggest a beginning or an end.

To the right, no colors, no stories, just a little framing and the blast of temporal sun. My story, the one I was writing, lived somewhere in there. Still amorphous, still radically strange, but beckoning. It hurt to look at it. I could not stop looking at it. It suffered itself into being.

I suffered, too.

Now, less than two months from the book's launch date, I ponder this strange existence of wading through the formidable dark toward a fledging, heartbreaking story, while thinking not at all about what the market will actually bear. What is the category? What is the tagline? What is the label? This book has none. I have flirted with doom. And persisted.

Why?

Because we can only write toward our obsessions.

Because we must be who we are.

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we writers are not down in the earth,

in the hurt of a mine. We are not shucking for treasures in the sea. We are not carrying boulders up the prickly side of Everest. We are not curing a broken vessel in a brain.

Still, writing is what we do, and the work becomes physical at times, wearying in its own strange ways. We sit down to it, and it runs away. We return to the words we thought we'd polished, and we delete delete delete, start a new page.

We despair. Oh. Have I. Ever.

But today I let my thoughts descend to the underworld of Santa Croce Cathedral in Florence, Italy, and found the piece of the story I'd been missing all along—the piece that at long last surprises and exhilarates me.

I can't write unless the work somehow surprises and therefore enlivens me.

I sit with a straighter back.

I reach for a cup of tea.

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