I read a disturbing comment by Arthur Miller in a short essay published in Granta recently describing Dylan Thomas as a man possessed by a spirit transported forward in time, as having a voice that was a musical instrument, as shot through with poetry, not a writer searching for a word or a theme. That got me. I often yearn for the sound of grand words in my ear, sung with intensity and a force that drives them through my fingertips to the keyboard where I'll see them shape my pretense of stature into literature. (The need to be bigger.)

A mute Shakespeare quivers within, but I can't shake him till he shouts, a feeling akin to something Garrison Kieler sneered at as a writing student's need to write. I stumble to my computer in the morning wanting my dreams to continue while I connect them to the written word, hoping they'll emerge in print as vibrant as they seemed in sleep. I'm the sort of writer Miller disparaged, searching for a word and a theme. He must have seen it a lot, literate spelunkers descending into caves full of murky feelings, steel picks in hand, chipping away, hoping to crack off a surprise diamond, a story everyone would treasure. All I've done time after time, aside from occasional outbursts I can't maintain for long, is probe for a good sentence, as if it could talk back to me, lead me on to a brother sentence, introduce me to a family of paragraphs. On the other hand, I'm always astonished at written outbursts I sometimes produce. They flow and ring true, almost effortlessly. They've been the better writing. They're usually motivated by anger, rarely by affection, even more rarely by lust or craving. A few of the notable pieces that drilled holes in the head of the reader were stories of anxiety. But all were short, some brief even for a short story. The ability to endure the entire life of a tale long enough to tell it end-to-end has so far escaped me (I have written only one novel, failed). Unendurable ecstasy indefinitely prolonged is a definition I've heard denoting great sexual experience. In comparison, how insignificant is a feeling, usually anger, that troubles me only long enough to fill a couple of pages and then evaporates before it brings a story or essay to life in a way a reader might want to live? Feelings come and go too quickly to become substantial parts of real characters. Instead of evolving emotions through the lives of characters in stories, I pick through piles of accidental connections hoping found objects fall together in a pleasing, interesting form. That's not a way to write.

The technique of trash sifting through spontaneous thoughts produces a style of writing in which words repeat, though I'm often unaware at the time of the association and the consequent repetition.

Bereft of D. Thomas' literary music and drive to mythological achievement, I depend on my probe for word and theme, hoping a miracle will happen. For example, a chain of associations, created by repeating a word in one sentence somewhere in the next, can set up a train of thought sometimes poetic, sometimes banal, but often surprisingly coherent. Here's an example:

William gnawed the bone. Hunger gnawing his stomach, exhausted, he crouched near the small fire he'd made by igniting a pile of jar labels, warming his knees and treasuring the last taste of burnt meat. The meat of his legs hung thin from starvation. He had starved himself slowly, rationing supplies, hoping to extend life until a rescue party might discover him. Discovery led him into his trap. What else had led him: curiosity, ambition, rebellion, arrogance, despair. Curiosity seemed the mildest and most laudable form of drive. Curiosity failed him now. He had no interest in knowing anything more about the terrain that isolated him, less curious about it than the particulars of his wasting body. He had wasted so much, his life, career, possibilities. How ironic that he was wasted now by a silly mechanical process. He would die because mechanical things needed watching. They were precious and watchers were a dime a dozen. "Keep an eye on everything," his boss had ordered before the plant furloughed every worker for a month, everyone but the watcher. The economic downturn meant no work, but the plant had to be maintained in case economic opportunity resumed, a watcher had to watch, to trim, check, lubricate, tinker, toy with the machinery to keep it humming. The hum faltered so William had entered the walk-in refrigerator to check on a coil he spied leaking coolant and the door had locked itself behind him, trapping him. Hadn't he been warned time and again about that door latch? Squatting and sagging against the metal interior of the door dented by his pounding on it desperate to raise an alarm, he looked up hoping to see a shadow pass the little window where he'd scribbled "Help, trapped inside" backward in the condensation on the glass. His glasses, fogged by his own breath, slipped forward. Weak with hunger, mucous membranes in his nose, mouth, and rectum raw, his ureter and eyelids aflame, he could barely see past the end of his nose, and amused himself by attempting to focus on his reflection in the foggy lenses. Was it cold or hunger that threatened him in his refrigerated prison? Actually the refrigeration was mild, a coolness sufficient to protect the stores, row upon row of jars, factory output preserved not by low temperature but by red pepper. Though his vision grew dim and he knew he was passing into shadow, he couldn't bring himself to eat any more from the Easy Open Jars. How stupid he had been to take a job as watchman in a idled Kim Chee plant infested by only one rat.

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