I wrote the first draft of "Toward a Theory of Blindness" last winter, when I think I was just starting to feel how strange the writing life was, how isolating it could be to spend weeks trying to pinpoint a particular sensation of loss or pain or elation. I had an overwhelming sense of slowly burying myself in emotional minutiae. Burkhard Bilger's piece about the sapphire industry in Madagascar came out in the New Yorker that October, and one cold November afternoon, tearing my hair out over some paragraph or another, I gave up and sat down in my chilly Iowa apartment and read his article straight through. It had a tremendous effect on me, that piece, and besides knocking me out of the burrow Iowa had become and reminding me that there was a world out there, it made me sit up straight and stop wondering if I had the wherewithal to write about something that mattered. That was the day it changed from a question of if to a question of how.

Because I hadn't really been a writer before I went to Iowa (I spent my first twenty-five years as a musician), I wasn't prepared for how many different kinds of fiction there were or how tirelessly people would champion the kind they believed in. I came to writing the same way I came to music—through my ear—and the stories I imagined writing were full of sentences that rang the right way; if a sentence was plain or clunky, I thought, well, it didn't deserve to be written. But there were loads of writers at Iowa—incredibly, diversely talented ones—and I discovered pretty quickly that a decent number of them didn't agree. They wanted things to happen in stories. Stubbornly, I kept right on writing my flowery sentences and carefully-titrated plots in which little, if anything, changed from page to page. I was kindly advised by just about everyone to amp up the "stakes" until, at some point during each semester, my classmates got sick and tired of fighting through an army of adjectives to get to the action and suggested, for Christ's sake, that something happen already.

Last winter was the winter I decided I'd had enough, too. Mr. Bilger's piece dropped into my lap like a ticking bomb, and armed with the research I did based on some of the facts he provided, I started this story. I gave myself two conditions: first, that I would write a gun into my story, and second, that I would put the language on the back burner. It was a fight, a bitter one, and there were stretches where I felt like an imposter. But in the end, what I felt more than anything was relief. Working with the structure of a real, action-driven plot, writing became an act of elucidation rather than obfuscation; I’d been so busy covering up the lack of plot in my stories with pretty sentences, I hadn't noticed all the holes.

I try to remind myself every time I sit down in front of my computer that deciding to become a writer means giving up the rights to any kind of withholding; a good story—a true story—doesn’t have anything to hide.

Aria Beth Sloss is a 2007 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Iowa Arts Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Yaddo Corporation. She lives in New York City, where she is stubbornly plugging away at a novel. "Toward a Theory of Blindness" is her first published story.