How Books Reveal Themselves

As a reader (before becoming a writer) I read as I had been taught to do. But books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer. In that capacity I have to place enormous trust in my ability to imagine others and my willingness to project consciously into the danger zones such others may represent for me. I am drawn to the ways all writers do this: the way Homer renders a heart-eating cyclops so that our hearts are wrenched with pity; the way Dostoyevsky compels intimacy with Svidrigailov and Prince Myshkin. I am in awe of the authority of Faulkner's Benjy, James's Maisie, Flaubert's Emma, Melville's Pip, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—each of us can extend the list. I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from—and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the writer's imagination.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
How can "the totally Other" act on us, let alone give any signal of its utterly inaccessible existence? The ultimate "particles," the bondings of elements in human consciousness whose orbits generate the quantum jump of faith [that propel one to imagine the "totally Other"], are presumably multiple. They are not unambiguously accountable to even the masters of introspection, of self-decoding, such as Pascal or Kierkegaard. They sink their roots into the finalities of the unconscious. Childhood experiences (according to Freud, this is where the discussion should stop) are seminal. Each atom of time in our life-histories can be causal either way. Belief or non-belief are closely resonant, thought at depths of intricacy that defy analysis, with our immersion and dissatisfactions with language.
George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life.
As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of . . .
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
. . . "the totally Other" . . .
George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life.
. . . is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation in the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this. It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl—the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green top, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface—and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world. In other words, I began to rely on my knowledge of how books get written, how language arrives; my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of the project. I began to rely on my understanding of what the linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the surprise that is the inevitable concomitant of the act of creation.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.