Rereading your wise Writing Life Stories this winter and musing on Shields’s stimulating, provocative “manifesto,” I can weigh in with certainty: no, you don’t do the same thing as he does. Not at all. Yes, Shields prefers nonfiction, but that’s not really the issue. That’s a red herring. He likes some fiction, actually a lot of fiction, since he’s well-read, but of a certain type. The issue is narrative—storytelling—and its tools. Shields says he’s not against narrative, not against telling stories. And that’s true: he’s not against TELLING stories. He hates the powerful, evolved art of scene, along with its ally plot. Like John Gardner before you, you emphasize scene. Gardner talked about it purely for fiction, as I recall, but in your case you’ve shown how it works in nonfiction as well, especially in memoir and narrative essays. And in your writing about writing you try to place scene within the great trifecta of storytelling: scene, summary, exposition. In that order. Shields reverses it. Except don’t try to give him ANY scene, bro. Won’t have it! Don’t want it! And forget plot or event sequence, too, while you’re at it.

As any journeyman writer knows, scenes take place in time and in a particular space, and man do they take space—pages—to convey. A good scene of me and Sam cleaning out the barn, using our pitchforks to pry up wedges of petrified manure, is going to take five to ten pages to do right. To show it. Our gut-wrenching labor, our banter to distract and amuse ourselves, the sparrows squabbling in the eaves, the day tipping toward evening in the light that slants through the dust we’ve raised. You can summarize what we did in one sentence—I think I just did—or explain it well in a paragraph, maybe two. And that’s what Shields wants and argues for: “Cut to the point, cut the artifice of scene and of unfolding the story via a plot. That’s tired, passe, crude. Just TELL me. I’m no child who needs to lose himself in another world, and I can’t respond to that move anyway. It bores me. It angers me.”

Trouble is, scenes are the best way to convey experience. To show how it was—really, how it felt to be you. This is what most readers crave, of course, to learn what another’s emotional experience in life is, or was. The hunger for this has fueled millions of years of storytelling, which at base is how our species has always bonded, sharing tears and laughter. That’s the real Reality Hunger. The hunger for stories that give us the experience of another’s subjective reality. We desire for others to understand our story, and we desire to understand theirs. Not intellectually. Emotionally.

Shields isn’t only a very smart and intellectual reader and writer, he’s a rebel, deeply contrarian when it comes to prose storytelling. And he has elevated his idiosyncratic objections into a philosophy, or tried, in Reality Hunger. For him, nonfiction, or even fiction, isn’t about how writing uses the ancient tools of storytelling in order to convey experience and to become art. Not about how I can share my sense of loss at Sam’s untimely death, so that others will understand how I feel and maybe share it. Shields seems to feel that’s unnecessary, or manipulative.

The question for writers is, Do you throw in with Roorbach and Gardner and the narrative tradition, or with Shields? For me, as time goes by, the fundamental things apply . . .

Shields likes to quote Goethe talking about how un-original he is. This is accurate, and bracing, since we are talking about one of the most original artist in the last 200 years. But what the short quotes don’t get at it is that this admission of unoriginality was just a starting point, and that by leaning on and learning from great predecessors, Goethe made the long climb toward greatness and originality.

Booya.

And David (Gessner), I know you’d be happy with a fridge full of beer, no food at all, even if the beer were all the same brand, just as long as there was an opener nearby. Or I guess they’re all screw-tops now.

But besides the fact that Shields comes off as an extremist, this was an almost magical reading experience (for this guy, anyway). It’s been a while since a book made me so giddy about reading and writing. I would save a chapter for each day, and as soon as I finished, run to the computer to start typing (nonsense, most of the time, but typing nonetheless).

The idea of collaging isn’t Shields’ by any means, and I think one of the most recent forerunners to Reality Hunger–Jonathan Lethem’s plagiarism essay–is even quoted in Reality Hunger. But Shield’s collaging is just so, so good. True, you can often tell which passages are his, but I think he also composed some of the most memorable lines in the book. Take this parenthetical to the “ds” chapter: “(I may have made this detail up, but it sounds right, it feels right, maybe it happened once; I’m going to leave it in.)” Dig it.

As for the absence of Thoreau and nature–the inclusion of which leads me to ask how “sick of nature” you really are–I believe Thoreau appears on page six. And Emerson is probably only eclipsed by Montaigne and D’Agata in appearances. Plus Annie Dillard sneaks in every now and then. But DESPITE the inclusion of the treehuggers, Reality Hunger stills achieves that elusive quality–writing a book that forces the reader to talk about it.

Oh, and amen to the enjoyability (word?) of reading author bios sometimes eclipsing the enjoyability of their work.

Thanks for the good read, David.