I get a number of newsletters, and one in particular from the Georgia Writers Association. The writer of this edition's column, Anthony Grooms, links to the website of a writer I had never heard of (no surprise), David Jauss. He writes short stories, poems, and essays, and he appears to be pretty well recognized. His books are expensive, though, discouraging me from purchase. But he has a lot of his work on his website, so I picked through it, reading "Glossalalia", and some parts of essays.
In discussing the topic of "write what you know" in fiction, he pooh-poohs it a bit, and tells of responses he got from readers who concluded that his fiction was so life-like and touched them so much that he must have experienced what they had.
The other phone call was from a Vietnam vet who had read my short story "Freeze," which is about a soldier in Vietnam who steps on a mine that doesn't explode, yet nonetheless has devastating effects on his life. The caller wanted to know if we'd ever met. "I remember that guy you wrote about," he said. "The lieutenant. And I think we must have been at Lai Khe at about the same time. Did you know Larry Kelvin? Or Rick Hammond?" When I told him I'd never been in Vietnam, or even in the military, he was more than disappointed, he was outraged. "What gives you the right to write about a war when you weren't even f-- there?" he demanded. Clearly, he felt as if he'd been taken in by a con man. And in a way, he had, for what is a fiction writer if not a confidence artist, someone who trades words for your trust and--if he's lucky--your money? And how can writers blame their readers for failing to recognize that fiction is fiction, not truth, when we do everything we can to make them believe something we imagined is true? Still, I wish he had realized that writers, like magicians, work in the realm of illusion, not reality. He would never assume that the magician actually sawed the lady in half, yet he was quick to assume that the soldiers I killed had bled real blood.
I didn't get a chance to defend myself to this caller--he hung up almost immediately after accusing me of the crime of lying in a work of fiction--but if I had, I would have told him that "Freeze," like "Rainier" and the rest of my stories, is a true story, but not true in the way he wanted. Its truth is not the kind that can be captured by a surveillance camera but the kind that appears in our dreams, a truth heightened by distortion and the odd juxtaposition of a lifetime's accumulation of images. Like a dream, a story, if it's any good, tells the truth about the author's secret, inner life, and as often as not it does so by telling lies about his public, outer life, for, as Oscar Wilde said, "One's real life is so often the life that one does not lead." And about the nature of that truth the reader sometimes knows more than the author.
Reading the part that I had bolded, I thought--"I write fiction and I am not conning people! If that is what fiction is, I want no part of it." And of course, that is not what fiction is. Perhaps it's a matter of "let the buyer beware." If the reader of a novel is so unsophisticated to not recognize it as a story made from various lived and imaginary, experienced and psychic bits and pieces of the authors life, then they can't get mad at the writer.
Yet a part of me says, if I write about a "type" of person, am I using the "type" of person for my own ends? If I write about a woman confined to a wheelchair due to an accident or a neuromuscular disease, am I using the whole class of women who are confined to a wheelchair to create my "art"?
Well, maybe. I think this is very possible. Maybe we are con men--is there a way not to be and still write good fiction?
It goes back to "telling the truth." Fiction does tell the truth but it is not true. That is its great irony, mystery, fault, triumph, and challenge.
A woman wrote me the following about my latest novel:
Hello, Barbara, just a trivial thought that won't go away. Again, just a month or so ago, we buried a pet up on the hill behind our house. Just a medium sized dog and no casket. My husband began it then had to leave, our young adult grandson and I then took turns digging. We finally got it deep and wide enough...but it's true our yard is unusually hard dirt.......
I won't give my answer here; it was insufficient. She seems to think there was autobiography in the story, or something from family lore. What I wanted to say is, "Every book of fiction I have ever read had parts where I thought, 'that's not like real life,' or 'that seems unrealistic' and yet I kept reading-- unless the unrealism piled up. If a novel about a certain person seems entirely realistic, that threatens to get kind of boring, I suspect. We are writing about one person, and all of us have somewhat unusual, even unbelievable things happen to us, even if only in small ways. We might get a disease that only one in 120,000 people of our sex get. (Like me) We might "by chance" meet someone who changes our lives drastically, for better, for worse, for adventure, for insight. The unexpected and unrealistic happens. We read fiction to learn about people different from us, I would hope." Those are defenses.
I write fiction because I want to tell stories. If people find enjoyment in them, I am happy. If they find human insight, even better. I have resolved myself to not making money or being well known. But I do know this.
You can write good fiction or bad fiction. Bad fiction is easy to pick out, usually from page 1, paragraph 1. Good fiction is more elusive; it takes reading a lot of the novel to determine whether it is really good or just nipping at the edges of good. I felt that way reading David Jauss' Glossalalia; the narrator was a little turd throughout, and the end tore at my heart after I put up with the turd for 30 minutes!
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