Thoughts on Fiction Writing and PKD

What fiction writing does to people

Photo by Gene Brutty on Unsplash

I commend people who can write fiction effortlessly, but that's never been my approach to crafting stories. I think my problem is that the writing is more intimate than if I were crafting nonfiction. I think it's easier for me to share nonfiction essays that have everything to do with me and my personal life, but when it comes to having those same emotions superimposed onto other figures, I have the hardest time navigating those waters.

I think the main reason for that is a certain reverence for fiction writers. I have the utmost respect for people who spend all day in their heads, deciphering what the world around them is saying to them. I think that comes to us as children, but then shortly after gets lost in the void. Childhood brings honesty. Once that gets stripped away by schooling and the pressures of adult life and social circumstances, then you find yourself in a situation where those attitudes no longer suit you. But the best artists, in my experience, are the ones who can hold onto those whimsical values and use them to paint a coherent and thought-provoking tale.

I think of authors whom I have shown interest in recently over the years, and one that I can think of that always intrigues me these days is Philip K. Dick. I think that some of his life story is more interesting than the stories he penned, but I think part of that stems from the writing he had during the early part of his career. Unlike other authors whom I admire, the majority of Dick's seminal work came later in life, after he had struggled to support himself for the majority of his adult life. While he was widely read in Europe and outside the United States, he didn't establish a following in his home country until right before his untimely passing.

Dick was someone whose life was much more interesting than the fiction he produced, and that's a pretty bold statement to make, considering he wrote the stories that Total Recall and Blade Runner were based on. But when you read about some of the things he supposedly witnessed and perceived, you start to see that Dick was either very unstable, or able to see things that the normal person couldn't. Possibly, it was a combination of the two.

On "2-3-74", Philip went crazy. We don't know what happened to Dick that day; the only thing we know is what he has recounted. The author was recovering from dental surgery, and a young woman who was tasked with bringing him pain meds was wearing a Christian necklace. Dick claims that a beam of pink light was shot from the pendant to his forehead. After that day, he continued to have strange visions and what he called "information downloads" of what he saw as forgotten truths. He started to believe that time collapsed during the Roman Empire, and history that took place after that was an elaborate system created to trick humanity into thinking so.

Dick believed that a godlike being known as VALIS was communicating with him. People thought Philip was crazy when he would relay this information to them, but the main story people point to when they want to say he wasn’t is how this vision oddly saved his son's life. Philip's infant son had a hernia that hadn't been detected by his doctors or family. He started to insist that the boy be taken in. Even the doctors refused to look at him, saying that the boy was completely fine. But when they ran a bevy of tests, sure enough, the kid had a damn hernia. If left untreated, it could have killed him. What's scary is they would have never found it without Dick acting like a loon. Also, how did he know that the kid was sick?

I often wonder what it was that drove him to write so much. When you look at his list of novels alone, not including his short stories, you get a sense that he wrote constantly. I wonder if all that time in his head is what broke him? Or, maybe it was some higher form of life and intelligence. Who am I to say?

I just know that Dick was an amazing writer and a troubled soul, and I feel sometimes those make the best fiction writers, unfortunately. It takes seeing inner pain and beauty to fully understand what you're trying to do on the page. I also think that it can be somewhat isolating and hard on the psyche to be in a room talking to people inside your head all day. But, someone has to do it.

I think all this has been floating around in my head because as I write more fiction and play around with different scenarios in my head, I feel like the majority of my time isn't trying to come up with the best way to phrase a sentence, it's how the mental toil that comes along with writing made up tales can sometimes be exhausting.