“He had fled a world that he had known and that had emotionally crucified him, but what was he here in this world whose impact loosed storms in his b… - Richard Wright

A sleepless spring night:
Yearning for what I never had
And for what never was.

Repeatedly I took stabs at writing, but the results were so poor that I would tear up the sheets. I was striving for a level of expression that matched those of the novels I read. But I always somehow failed to get onto the page what I thought and felt. Failing at sustained narrative, I compromised by playing with single sentences and phrases. Under the influence of Stein’s Three Lives, I spent hours and days pounding out disconnected sentences for the sheer love of words. I would write: “The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam.” Or: “The child’s clumsy fingers fumbled in sleep, feeling vainly for the wish of its dream.” “The old man huddled in the dark doorway, his bony face lit by the burning yellow in the windows of distant skyscrapers.” My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. I strove to master words, to make them disappear, to make them important by making them new, to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the reader with a sense of a new world. That was the single aim of my living.

In an era when fiction with political intent was widely condemned, Wright’s haunting novel, with its clear political message, made me unafraid to write a political novel. It also showed me that presenting horrifying actions can serve a powerful literary purpose, and that “shocking” can be high praise.