Getting personal

You're writing a novel. Lie.

caw.

It worked for James Frey--it can work for you!

Perhaps if you looked at it from a theraputic POV, cleansing even, it may turn out to be a positive experience.

blacbird said:

You're writing a novel. Lie.

caw.

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Just like Blacbird said. You don't have to have everything true. Exaggerate.

Oh and have you read "The Child Called It" and those sequels? Based on his life I forget the author's last name but the first is Dave or David.

Good luck, popmuze.

If the troubles you are referring to are of the kind that I suspect, you are going to need a good friend or two who will support you through this. I see no way to keep yourself insulated during this quest.

Again, good luck.

Adding a little fictionalization makes the unbeliveable believeable and interesting. Truth is stranger than fiction, and fiction must be added to personalize the story.

But this isn't about truth and lies and fictionalization, is it? It's about emotional integrity, about cutting as close to the bone as you can get.

I'm not sure I have any advice to give. How I deal with the dark and disturbing and uncomfortable parts of my own work -- which, I should admit, is not directly autobiographical at all -- is to gripe and complain and remind myself that I got myself into this mess because I thought it was important. Then I sit down and write it.

I also complain to my husband a lot.

Past

I say use your past, and the more troubling teh past is, the better it works in fiction. Using your past is what experience is for, and is, I think, what good fiction is all about. And it is, I thnk, why many young writers have troubel getting published. They haven't yet lived enough, and they don't use what they have lived in their fiction.

Experience only matters if you use it.

Maybe you will plunge along with the character. This probably means you're writing good fiction.

Hi popmuze. This is a troubling dilemma, no doubt. I also have a checkered past, as do many people.

The fact that you recognize this and have also addressed whatever issues you had is a testimony to your strength of character. Whatever problems you had, you dealt with them. Be proud of this. You fell down. You got up. You're a winner in my eyes.

This may be a cathartic liberation for you. If it gets too rough, put it on the back-burner until you're ready. This seems to be a story you need to tell. You don't have to tell it until you're ready.


Good Luck,




Mike

Penname.

popmuze said:

But, Grasshopper, you may be onto something. What is it that you think you know? Or could you be one of those people from my past I might be trying to fictionalize?

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Whoa there, popmuze. I'm certain that I'm not one of those people from your past. I just sensed something in your posted message, that's all. My vagueness was a function of discretion rather than disguise.

With all due respect, I don't think I will post in this thread anymore.

I do wish you all the best.

The toughest thing to address with the premise described is the collateral damage to self. Yeah, you can find yourself mired in a plethora of negative emotions when you cut close to the bone. It becomes difficult to maintain perspective when you deliberately resurrect dark memories. Frankly, I don't know if there's an easy to deal with this. However, like everything else in life, you can usually spin it in a positive direction.

After all, those past, dark episodes are in the rearview mirror, and that's a positive thing in, and of, itself. It's not a bad thing to remind yourself of that as you write.

This subject is near and dear to many, including me. So many people have much to say, and in fact, they may have best-sellers waiting to happen. They just need the right timing, the right spin (working towards a solution vs paying back Aunt Betsy- bless her little two timing heart!)

It helps if we make a list of questions, and answer them as honestly as possible:

Why do I want to write this? Valedation, revenge, desire for sympathy, because I think it will help others? God told me? I want that pig to pay!

Sometimes we have mixed motives, and don't really know all these answers.

What will I likely get out of this? Fame? Fortune? Pissed off relatives? People who think I'm a loon? A spot on Oprah? It will help others?

Sometimes the payoff is not what we expect, and in fact causes us regret.

In terms of opening wounds, it can be a two-edged sword. I think we all want to touch lives, and our story can do that. But we don't want to wind up someone's poster-boy for sad songs; or worse, having our meltdown play out in front of a camera.

So, it helps if we are writing from a position of strength, which means we have some degree of healing already, and we have a defined purpose in our minds of what we want to accomplish. And for me, the best stories have some kind of redemption attached to them.

A friend of mine wrote his story and asked me to read it. I know he has a best-seller inside, but he's too wounded to actually tell it yet. It's just dark without light, and reads like a diary cry for help.

I have a number of close friends whose lives are made for T.V stories, and in fact may some day be published. But some of them need to write the last chapter- in reality- first. They still have something to overcome which will make everyone love the ending. Example, they have the most compelling childhood stories in the world (I know them), but their personal lives are falling apart (I know them well), can't keep a job, relationships falling apart, their addictions keep recurring, and their name is on someone's 911 speed dial.

Howabout you just do what feels to be right.

Phenominal post, Nateskate. I don't know if anyone could have touched on this subject with more humility or compassion. Well done, and thank you.




Mike

popmuze said:

To Nate and the others,
I don't want to mislead anybody (like James Frey) into thinking what I have to say may be in the least bit inspirational. Embarrassing is more like it, especially to me. Of course, if it ever got published, I'd just have to say that none of it was remotely autobiographical.

Neverless, for much of my writing life my mantra has been "if I don't tell this story, then I don't deserve to be a writer."

I got over that. But those scenes and people are still as fresh in my mind as yesterday.

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From what you've just said, I'd be curious why all of your writing hopes were put into this basket? Or even why writing is in a basket at all? You don't have to earn the right to exist, to write, to thumb your nose at writing?

On some level, look at writing as a gift you either have or don't, and since you can put together coherant sentences, I think you do. And it is one gift amongst many. You get to choose how and when and where to use your gifts, even to misuse them.

I think at one point I presumed to have an interesting life's story; and some parts are. But some parts are sad, some of them are dark. My own feeling is that things happen for a reason, even bad things, and good things come out of bad things. However, when it comes to writing my own story, I haven't entirely mastered how to do it without hurting others. Perhaps I never will, and my life story will simply be that it made me who I am and taught me what I need to know, and every once and awhile I can use annecdotes from the past to help others, which has already happened.

Part of the mix is figuring out motivation? What do I want out of this? Then wisdom, "What is likely to come from this?" My father was married three times, and we were from the first marriage, the most dysfunctional, and he was out of my life for all intents and purposes when I was 3 1/2 years old. That is not the father my half-sisters knew. And that is not the Prince of a man that his third wife with grown children knew.

Well, if I decided to rail about this or that, constructing my picture, I realize I will wound my sisters, and his third wife and family terribly. He died about a year ago, and he died a Prince in their eyes. Well, he just wasn't a Prince to me and my brothers.

I have no desire to write about that at this point, but in a sense, my desire was not that they should see him like I saw him or my two brothers saw him.- my life's story. Rather, it was to see him as my sisters saw him, and the third wife saw him. He was beloved by many, and therefore couldn't have been the narrow person I saw through a child's eyes. To many people he was bigger than life. He was known and liked everywhere he went. Yet, I wouldn't hear from him for five years at a time growing up, and our interactions were always strained. I had nothing but bad memories.

Again, there is so much to weigh when writing our lives. Well, in some respects I think we (especially those who had paid a price to get through life) have something great to say, but ultimately it comes down to the filter through which we view the past, the filter we want the reader to see our past.

I love my sisters, even though I didn't grow up with them. That weighs heavily into my thinking. They love their dad, and I respect what fond memories they have of him. Ah, I digress again, but I'm glad, because in the past year, I think I've come to love and appreciate my father more than ever, so much so I asked his forgiveness post-mortum. I realized he was never to me what I wanted him to be; but my regrets are that I was never to him what he needed me to be, the son who saw the good in him and appreciated all that he did do.