Fiction Must Tell the Ineffable Truth

. . . Art, by its very nature, cannot be written for the purpose of demonstrating a preconceived idea, even a religious or spiritual one. It must tell the ineffable truth about the human experience. The artist therefore has to be willing to go into that place in her soul which is so deep and so dark that she can't see her way around, where she can't rely on traditional knowledge or conventional ways of knowing, and she has to open her eyes to whatever's there.

Writing is an act of compassion, of empathy, of generosity of spirit, both from writer to character and writer to reader, and reading is the reader's act of reciprocal compassion. Writing is an act of faith, faith that if I tell a story honestly enough it will resonate in to the loves of people who haven't lived these things, faith that if I listen closely.

From a talk by Elizabeth Dewberry, novelist Many Things Have Happened Since He Died and Sacrement of Lies.