Thomas Fuller on Monsieur Ambivalence

A writer knows he's on to something when he throws 162-pages of his writing into the flames of the fireplace in a cabin in upstate Wyoming and the thing catches fire, stands on its head and starts dancing.

Watching his manuscript metabolize so suddenly from life to death and in such brilliant Technicolor's, the writer thinks maybe the thing has a chance after all. But it's too late, the writer was too faithful to the principle of creation and destruction for his own good, and what he'd spent three years doing is now nothing more than a little pile of black ash.

O well, there was nothing there to begin with and there's almost nothing there now. If he's really a writer all he can do is start the writing over once again, stare into the fire for a undetermined length of time and try to recapture in words what he'd seen when his manuscript first burst into flame.

Fortunately there's a small creek that runs behind the cabin that's filled with 15-year old single-malt scotch. As the writer not only re-writes but re-conceives his writing, he's often to be seen crawling from the cabin to the creek late at night when nobody's looking.

At some point, where he'll never be sure, the writing turns away from writing into the inevitability of every word being where it needs to be for the story to be told, and the writer disappears into some new fire that waits just for him to throw himself into.