A journalist friend swore she couldn’t write fiction: she couldn’t write a story that wasn’t true. A novelist confessed he was a liar: he couldn’t write anything true.
Most writing falls someplace in between. In the nebulous zone between actual events, people, locations, emotional experience--and imagination.
I just finished reading “The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy” by Barbara Vine, which deals with the parallels between the life of a writer and his writing. In this novel, Gerald Candless, a bestselling author, dies unexpectedly. His publisher asks the daughter to write her father’s memoir. She makes an enthusiastic start, but soon discovers Gerald Candless doesn’t exist prior to the age of twenty-five when he changed both his name and identity. Through research and interviews the daughter finds out part of the truth. She discovers the facts but not the motives. The why and the emotional anguish can only be revealed in the novels he wrote.
Upon reading a published novel written by a friend, I was surprised to find some of the things I had said to the author repeated verbatim in the dialogue. While the character who spoke them resembled me in some small ways, she was definitely not me as a whole. She was a creation sprung from the nebulous zone.
We all draw on our own lives and those that touch ours when we create stories. Who in the critique group reading someone’s piece hasn’t wondered… Did that really happen? Is that him? His girl friend? Me?
I so think that all the time... did s/he really? Is that true?? BTW, nothing I write is true in case you were wondering.
ReplyDeleteI don't buy it for a moment, Tori. :-) I think everything that we write represents pieces of our real lives. We may switch up names and places and chronology -- but all writing (or at least all of the best writing) comes from real-life experience. Even the most outlandish sci-fi or fantasy gets its traction because of what it reveals about our everyday lives.
ReplyDeleteAh well... you saw through me, Eric. Seriously: I do think that there is something to be said for a writer's imagination and the effort to write from the point of view of someone or something completely different from oneself -- it still needs to reveal something to be great, but it does not have to come from something we "know."
ReplyDeleteEverything I write is truth. Some metaphorical, but most just the plain old regular kind, thinly veiled.
ReplyDeleteAnything we write is designed to reveal a truth of one kind or another, right? Reality and imagination are the tools to get the writer there.
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