The breathing story: fiction as a tool for living

ABSTRACT Fiction writers are always scanning for stimuli – laughter from an open window, the crime section, a paraglider over skyscrapers. What’s the story there? we ask, rarely stopping to ask what’s the story here. What’s with me? Sometimes the story’s not up there with the paraglider but down here in our trying to make sense of it within our own confusing pockets of existence. For at the bottom of every story is this story: we don’t know who we are. So what if the fiction writer lets go of the intention to write about ‘dramatic stuff happening’ and instead leans into their daily confusion, uncertainty, discomfort? What might they discover there? This article lays out a process of fiction writing driven not by intention but by active attention. By setting aside commitments to narrative craft and instead placing ourselves within a richer field of interference, we might get beyond the limits of our imaginations. Furthermore, we might improvise from our anti-narrative experience a new kind of narrative. It's only when writers challenge themselves to renegotiate where ‘interest’ might lie in a work of fiction that their fiction becomes a more vital activity – a tool for living.