Unless It Moves the Human Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

house with a thousand doors. You may enter your house from any one of its doors, but only one door is right for your story. How do you know?”
    “Does it have to do with who tells the story?” asks Donna.
    “You tell me.”
    “Well,” she says, “I suppose that’s what’s meant by point of view.”
    “And why choose one point of view over another?”
    “Because,” says Jasmine, “that determines what you want your story to mean.”
    “Good. When Hamlet tells Hamlet , it means one thing. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell the play, it means something else. Same thing happens when the witch tells Wicked .”
    “Beginnings are impossible for me,” says Kristie. “Even when you know who is to tell your story, it’s hard to know where to begin.”
    “Where to begin?” says Nina. “People say that when they’re scrounging around for a starting point.”
    “And they do that, because a starting point, of anything, is subjective. At best, it’s the place where you think the story will unfold most completely and with greatest impact.”
    I poke about in my canvas book bag, and come up with a quotation from Daniel Deronda . It is one of a dozen such quotations I carry around, like a homeless man’s furnishings.
    “Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning,” wrote George Eliot. “Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Naught. . . . No retrospect will take us to the true beginning and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.”
    “What is especially wonderful about Eliot’s observation is what she says about the scientist, supposedly the least poetic of writers. Even he must guess at the moment between the tick and the tock when time is nothing and the story of the universe can get under way. The beginning of a piece will often arrive on its own, unbidden. It will tilt at you, like a plant in the wind.”
    I forage for another quotation, from Kafka: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
    “This is starting to sound mystical,” says Sven, to whom the mystical does not seem to appeal.
    “I know. Because often the beginning must just come to you. And I can’t explain it, but it does.”
    We speak of the odd selectivity of the writer, and how it is tied to the imagination. Why do some things catch your eye, and some things don’t? You notice a fragment of red wool caught on a hedge. Did the fragment merely drift there, or did it snag on the hedge, part of a sweater belonging to a girl who was walking by? Or was she making love with her boyfriend, the gardener’s son? Or was she raped by a gang of bikers who held her against that hedge, and the red fabric was left to tell of the crime? Or did the piece of wool drop from the sky after an airplane explosion? Whatever its story, the redness stands out against the green hedge, which is natural and permanent, in splendid desolation. The remnant is human, temporary. It may blow away, but not yet, not before you notice it.
    “You may be affected by your mood, too. Sometimes you’re receptive to your imagination, sometimes you shut it out. Your phone rings. When you answer, the person on the other end hangs up. If you are not feeling writerly, you dismiss the incident as a wrong number. If you are feeling writerly, the person at the other end of the phone was your high school sweetheart who has longed for the sound of your voice all these years, or a burglar waiting for you to leave the house, or your friend who has a bone to pick with you, but thinks the better of