A disclaimer
January 28, 2005 | 1:59 pm | Blog | Family, Writing | 1
For the last few summers that I was in high school, my mom spent a lot of money to send me to Europe with a company that sponsored educational school-related trips. I went to Greece, Italy, England, France, and all the places in between. I have always kept a journal in which I write extensively, and travel was no exception. Many of these stories made their way into my little cut-and-paste Kinko’s zine.
On one trip, I wound up in France with two idiot girls. We’ll call them Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. Their idea of a vacation in a foreign country was to spend everyday in a three-star hotel watching bad American cable television and eating at European McDonald’s.
I chronicled these events in my little zine, and one day, my mother, knowing she was strictly forbidden to read anything I’d written, snuck into my bedroom to investigate.
I was relaxing in a bubble bath when she burst in to the bathroom, angry and emotional.
“I just want you to know I read your writing, and I’m very disappointed in you,” she said harshly, barely able to contain the cracking in her voice. “I paid a lot of money to send you on that trip, and for you to be so ungrateful…”
I sighed heavily.
“This is exactly why I don’t allow you to read anything I write,” I said. Clearly she didn’t understand the idea of creative license. Yeah, those girls were annoying, but I tended to overemphasize the negative and underemphasize the good times I had.
She was still mad.
“Yeah, but you pass this thing out to complete strangers who read about your personal life all the time,” she said defensively.
“Yes, but that’s exactly the point,” I tried to explain. “These people don’t know me, they have no personal connection to me. And more importantly, they won’t judge me. And besides, it’s fiction. You can’t take everything I write seriously.”
I’ve often thought about this. I’ve been reading a lot of David Sedaris lately, and I recently read a book by a Houston writer name Marsha Recknagel. Both these people write with intense brutality about their family and friends, using peoples’ real names, and I often wonder how they escape hostility, much less legal action.
I’m a journalist now, which requires a certain degree of delicacy. There is no creative license in journalism, which leaves me conflicted. I want to strive for absolute truth, but my personal philosophy is that there is no such thing. I believe there is no such thing as the whole truth, just several versions of it. My goal is to provide as many versions of the truth as possible, and let readers decide.
In my own writing, on the other hand, I strive for effect. Yes, most of what I write is based on true, personal events, but I hesitate to call them autobiographical. Real life is boring, folks — it’s the spin that makes it interesting. For effect, I may emphasize certain things, both negative and positive. This is not to say that these events actually occurred as I depict them. Plus, memory is always slanted. Memory is never pure, and sometimes we can only remember the bad things, and sometimes we can only remember the best things.
In my personal writing, I try my best to capture my own reactions and my own thoughts. Sometimes I’m harsh; sometimes I’m judgmental and over-reactive. Sometimes I’m hypersensitive. But what matters to me is the initial gut reaction. And sometimes, with all of us, our initial gut reaction is not as accurate as our rational reaction, which comes much, much later.
I try to write as openly and honestly as possible. But I also tend to over-emphasize the details. So in some ways, this is my apology for being too personal. In other ways, this is my apology for being too dramatic. I guess either way we lose.
I feel your pain, Scootercock. I’ve found that the only way I could ever be a successful writer, since I have trouble writing anything that isn’t somehow connected to my life (write what you know, etc.), is for everyone I care about to die.
It seems harsh, yes, but for the sake of my writing, I’m asking my wife, friends and family to kick off now and leave me alone to put out a kick-ass novel. You know, if I could stop crying.