Jacob came to the first night of the thesis reading, even though he wasn't reading. I stopped him by the cheese cubes and crackers. After two readers, he tapped me on the shoulder, "Do you know how to get out of here without making a scene?" He followed me up the back, cinder block stairs and out to the air. We smoked on a bench next to a construction, temporary fence, the block-long, orange plastic stencil behind us wrapping up a patch of campus green. A baby backhoe hulked in the field, above a pit, deep enough for the roots of the tree that lay beside it. Come morning, no doubt, its shovel went back to chunking out grass, topsoil, sediment, clay, rock, but at that moment: stopped still, driverless.

It had been a while, but we had a running conversation:

Me, "You need to take a break from this novel, man. Write about the old men on the stoops with the fish-eye glasses, write about waitresses from New Jersey, write about anything but."

Jacob, "Nothing I want more. Catalogue the amazing total, all the shaking, great tower of voices."

Me, "Yeah. Get some new voices. Get some new energy. . . you do great voices."

Jacob, snidely "Yeah? Tell me something I don't know. You think I want to write this? I want to write old people, an old couple, old Jewish guys."

Me, "Yep, gotta get those voices while they're still around."

Jacob was in my first workshop at Columbia, another lover of language, a fellow soldier in the war for words. Each new installment of his novel, we talked about the need to carry a character by his voice, to keep each sentence taut, every page electric. Jacob's novel came up against the same critique every semester—Joseph, the narrator, was too ironic, the arch voice was too high a gate around the feelings of the two brothers. You can't get over it, they said. So Jacob toned it down, and the class was pleased. But in a week, he came back with a vengeance, having decided that watering-down was not the answer, that there had to be a way to let the reader into the gate, feel the feeling, without sacrificing the voice.

Now, after a year and a half I am reading through his novel, and I see that he has taken the difficult road and made it work. Joseph is still imperious, but underneath his aloofness is a current of pain. Gordon is still witty, but now distracted enough, occasionally, that the reader catches him caring for his brother.

The first day of our workshop, the teacher asked an impossible question—What is writing. . . What is it to write. . . Something like that, and I knew as we went around the table that Jacob wasn't going to play. At first he said nothing and then that he didn't think we could profitably discuss the topic. But thinking of Jacob and the impossible question, here are some thoughts.

To dig into the deep place of the reader, writers find the opposite deep place in themselves. An abyss so dark is easy to find; we know its edges, even if we haven't been to the bottom. But to write, we go down like archaeologists, with lighted helmet, trowel, two tape measures, level, plumb line. We shuffle down on our knees and map it, each crevice, each change in the soil; we draw a map for each ten centimeter level of depravity. We count the lithics, apply the law of superimposition, determine what is recent deposit, what is old.

Just finding the pit, though, is easy compared to giving up the darkness of it, believing that there will be something left of us when we take it apart. Writing dismantles a place inside us: the difficulty with digging is that it destroys.

Then, we do not go to the reader with our maps and notes and compass readings and lay them out and say—see, see how it is. . . see how dark it is. We do not point to a graph of ceramics or of the change in the soil from loam to clay. We do not show on the map where an old feature was disturbed by more recent construction.

We do not show the blueprints to readers, but roll up our sleeves, make the voices real, and build the pit inside them.

Jacob and I eventually got up from the bench outside, made it back down to the cheese cubes and crackers and then to the reading. I read something that night that Jacob hadn't heard before, and, when his turn came up the next night, he read something new to me, a story, not the novel. And we each questioned, praised: "New material?"

Yeah, new material.

What better? To make something new where there wasn't a thing before.