The most common advice I have heard given to writers is to write what one knows. I can certainly see why this is the general advice. It is the path of least resistance. When one knows, they need not doubt, and so the words pour onto the writer’s word processing document according to the natural rhythm and cadence of speech. The reader is allowed to suspend their belief that the words were ever painstakingly manufactured before striking their retina from the screen or, rather reckless for today’s age, from print. It is the imperative of the writer then to not only take up full-time residence in their imagination, but also to live life to its bounds—and have processed enough meaning from that life to have formed “wisdom”—so that the story they later manufacture, which intrigues its audience because it is larger than life, remains grounded in its realism. Live first, write later—a wise tenet for most, save for any writer of promise, of course.
When I began Love is my Project, I was twenty-nine and compelled to write. But despite having lived as many years, and having spent the better part of my twenty-eighth year conducting a global and rather surreptitious investigation across many ancient, many enlightened texts, I could not say, beyond the hesitancy of a doubt, that I knew anything at all. I was having for myself a Descartes moment. Like the cards of a house gone awry, I was collapsing rather momentously into a heap upon the table—back to that radical square one; and not for the first time. I had attempted three times in as many years to write something significant. These ventures bore little fruit. I possessed a fateful gene encoded to doubt, the inheritance of which is of no difficulty to trace patrilineally—or so I thought. That gene had replicated so successfully, or rather the circumstances of its propagation had been so amenable (nature versus nurture in this context is not to be discerned), I began to severely doubt even the doubter; thus, the cancer spread.