 |
| Elmore Leonard |
Showing posts with label nonfiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nonfiction. Show all posts
Friday, April 20, 2018
From Me to You: Hard Truths
In the same week, I gave a presentation at CSUN about how to submit your work, and I got into a conversation about what to expect when you're submitting your work. Both of these situations made me realize that I've left something important out of the From Me to You series: hard truths. That is, the parts of the writing life that just suck and are painful to internalize, and that you can either learn about on your own over many annoying years, or that you can listen to crusty old me about today.
Friday, July 8, 2016
Cue the Berets and the Wine
A few weeks ago, I submitted the Kathy Ireland story to a market, and almost immediately I got an email back from one of the editors asking me whether I considered it fiction or nonfiction. I had no idea how to answer this question. The real answer is for us to sit around with wine, in our berets, and talk until someone has to go pay the babysitter. But that's stupid and pretentious and inefficient to tell an editor, someone who probably just wants to forward my submission to the appropriate slusher.
By wordcount, the Kathy Ireland story (let's shorten it to KIS) is nonfiction. Most of its 1,600 words consist of me narrating about film and my experience at an opera, and all of those parts are either true or my true opinions. Then there's about 500 words of fiction: two sections of me imagining the interior thoughts of Kathy and of Meryl Streep.
After I finished writing, I wasn't sure myself whether it was fiction or nonfiction. My tendency is to think that a shred of fiction, of the intentionally invented, paints the entire work with that hue of literary endeavor. You apply Photoshop to a picture, bang, it's Photoshopped; you can't be a little bit pregnant. On the other hand, the KIS is, really is, nonfiction, for the most part, in a way that's important to me. I strained to tell as much of the truth as I could in the KIS, in a way that was new to me when I wrote it last spring but which has become closer to a default mode as I've written more stories like it.
I still call it a story in my mind, because calling it an essay would be disingenuous and calling it "this weird thing I wrote" is not very professional. When I describe and/or submit it and similar stories, I've been calling them "hybrid essays", a pretty and approximate term that doesn't mean all that much outside of academia and a small cadre of writers like Maggie Nelson.
A growing part of me is simply uninterested in how work like this is categorized. I'm interested in what other people will say about it, but in an intellectual rather than a personal way (like, cue the berets and the wine, I got no babysitter to pay). I don't have much invested in the labels that gatekeepers will put on the KIS and work like it. I get the need for that kind of labeling, because I know firsthand that it's impossible to figure out where to find Maggie Nelson in a given bookstore. Such labels, failing all else, are a practical necessity. I'm fine with that, I comprehend that, I haven't a whisper of anarchy in my personality and you couldn't convince me that there should just be a single label of BOOKS under which everything is tossed alphabetically. Definitely not.
But how I think of myself as a writer just isn't involved in such a calculation. I always try to tell the truth, and whether that's a literal truth which has a set of, let's say, journalistic standards to which I need to hold myself, or a life-truth that is best communicated using situations and characters and ideas that I made up - more and more, now, it's all the same to me.
What I have to say seems to demand that I cross the streams. So be it. I read Nelson's Jane: A Murder last week, and it felt so much richer for combining poetry and nonfiction, much more so than a normal prose book about the same material would have been. That's something I could stand to hear about my work.
But it won't be said about the KIS anytime soon. It got rejected by the market that wanted to know what I considered it.
My reply said that by word count it was nonfiction, but it did have a little fiction in it. And I apologized for not being able to answer the question properly. The real answer is that I want the reader to consider the work herself and tell me what she thinks. What I think of my work is unsurprising; I live inside my head full-time and am reasonably aware of my opinions. What others think of my work is much more interesting to me.
In fact, I'm extremely curious to know where other writers and readers draw the line between fiction and nonfiction. Do you, too, have this idea that one stitch of fiction makes the whole hem fake? Do you think that essays which stretch the truth, like John D'Agata's famously do, should be named fiction instead?
By wordcount, the Kathy Ireland story (let's shorten it to KIS) is nonfiction. Most of its 1,600 words consist of me narrating about film and my experience at an opera, and all of those parts are either true or my true opinions. Then there's about 500 words of fiction: two sections of me imagining the interior thoughts of Kathy and of Meryl Streep.
After I finished writing, I wasn't sure myself whether it was fiction or nonfiction. My tendency is to think that a shred of fiction, of the intentionally invented, paints the entire work with that hue of literary endeavor. You apply Photoshop to a picture, bang, it's Photoshopped; you can't be a little bit pregnant. On the other hand, the KIS is, really is, nonfiction, for the most part, in a way that's important to me. I strained to tell as much of the truth as I could in the KIS, in a way that was new to me when I wrote it last spring but which has become closer to a default mode as I've written more stories like it.
I still call it a story in my mind, because calling it an essay would be disingenuous and calling it "this weird thing I wrote" is not very professional. When I describe and/or submit it and similar stories, I've been calling them "hybrid essays", a pretty and approximate term that doesn't mean all that much outside of academia and a small cadre of writers like Maggie Nelson.
A growing part of me is simply uninterested in how work like this is categorized. I'm interested in what other people will say about it, but in an intellectual rather than a personal way (like, cue the berets and the wine, I got no babysitter to pay). I don't have much invested in the labels that gatekeepers will put on the KIS and work like it. I get the need for that kind of labeling, because I know firsthand that it's impossible to figure out where to find Maggie Nelson in a given bookstore. Such labels, failing all else, are a practical necessity. I'm fine with that, I comprehend that, I haven't a whisper of anarchy in my personality and you couldn't convince me that there should just be a single label of BOOKS under which everything is tossed alphabetically. Definitely not.
But how I think of myself as a writer just isn't involved in such a calculation. I always try to tell the truth, and whether that's a literal truth which has a set of, let's say, journalistic standards to which I need to hold myself, or a life-truth that is best communicated using situations and characters and ideas that I made up - more and more, now, it's all the same to me.
What I have to say seems to demand that I cross the streams. So be it. I read Nelson's Jane: A Murder last week, and it felt so much richer for combining poetry and nonfiction, much more so than a normal prose book about the same material would have been. That's something I could stand to hear about my work.
But it won't be said about the KIS anytime soon. It got rejected by the market that wanted to know what I considered it.
My reply said that by word count it was nonfiction, but it did have a little fiction in it. And I apologized for not being able to answer the question properly. The real answer is that I want the reader to consider the work herself and tell me what she thinks. What I think of my work is unsurprising; I live inside my head full-time and am reasonably aware of my opinions. What others think of my work is much more interesting to me.
In fact, I'm extremely curious to know where other writers and readers draw the line between fiction and nonfiction. Do you, too, have this idea that one stitch of fiction makes the whole hem fake? Do you think that essays which stretch the truth, like John D'Agata's famously do, should be named fiction instead?
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Potential Reading and Polanski
Today I have for you 1) a bit of writing news with some uncertainty attached to it, and 2) a piece of actual writing with dubious merit attached to it.
My essay "This Is Not a Safe World" will appear in the 2015 issue of the Southern California Review, which is the litmag for the University of Southern California. I've known this since January and have woken up remembering it on about half the days since I found out, because it still blows my mind that they wanted this essay, because nobody wanted this essay, it got more than a dozen completely perfunctory rejections. Sending it to SCR was an arrow into the air, and I continue to be astonished that it hit its target.
The news part of this news is that the release party for SCR is taking place on April 24th at The Last Bookstore - two weeks from tomorrow. I got an email a couple of weeks ago announcing this and asking all the contributors whether they wanted to read. I emailed back right away that I wanted to read - I have daydreamed over the idea of reading at The Last Bookstore, genuinely one of my favorite places of all the places I've been in my life - and I have not gotten a reply as of yet. So I don't know if I'll get to read, but maybe I will. Come anyway, on April 24th at 7 PM, to The Last Bookstore to mingle and browse and listen to everyone who does get to read.
I'm proud of the essay (otherwise I wouldn't have kept sending it out after getting no encouragement), but it is quite a personal personal essay. It reveals things about me that, if you know me in life, you may not be comfortable knowing. I hope, if you attain access to the 2015 SCR, or if my essay is chosen to be readable by the journal's website's proprietors, that you read it and enjoy it, or at least that it makes you think. But if you decide to steer clear because you'd prefer some elements of my history to remain unknown to you, I'm OK with that.
That's the news, so here's the writing. I composed this as an exercise about a year ago, and Matt made me think of it the other night, and I'm posting it in part because I have no real idea of its worth. It was an experiment in organized thought. See what you think.
My essay "This Is Not a Safe World" will appear in the 2015 issue of the Southern California Review, which is the litmag for the University of Southern California. I've known this since January and have woken up remembering it on about half the days since I found out, because it still blows my mind that they wanted this essay, because nobody wanted this essay, it got more than a dozen completely perfunctory rejections. Sending it to SCR was an arrow into the air, and I continue to be astonished that it hit its target.
The news part of this news is that the release party for SCR is taking place on April 24th at The Last Bookstore - two weeks from tomorrow. I got an email a couple of weeks ago announcing this and asking all the contributors whether they wanted to read. I emailed back right away that I wanted to read - I have daydreamed over the idea of reading at The Last Bookstore, genuinely one of my favorite places of all the places I've been in my life - and I have not gotten a reply as of yet. So I don't know if I'll get to read, but maybe I will. Come anyway, on April 24th at 7 PM, to The Last Bookstore to mingle and browse and listen to everyone who does get to read.
I'm proud of the essay (otherwise I wouldn't have kept sending it out after getting no encouragement), but it is quite a personal personal essay. It reveals things about me that, if you know me in life, you may not be comfortable knowing. I hope, if you attain access to the 2015 SCR, or if my essay is chosen to be readable by the journal's website's proprietors, that you read it and enjoy it, or at least that it makes you think. But if you decide to steer clear because you'd prefer some elements of my history to remain unknown to you, I'm OK with that.
That's the news, so here's the writing. I composed this as an exercise about a year ago, and Matt made me think of it the other night, and I'm posting it in part because I have no real idea of its worth. It was an experiment in organized thought. See what you think.
Monday, May 6, 2013
Between Me and Embellishment
I revised the boy-and-mom crisis story, and really it turned out much better than I thought. I think the ending is too obvious, though, not obtuse and literary enough. I don't know how or whether to fix it.
On Thursday I started on an essay that's partially about a continuing low-level struggle I've been having with the property management of my apartment complex, but to paraphrase Adrian Mole, it's not really about that, it's very deep, it's about life and stuff like that. It seemed to be going well, but then I accidentally got too drunk to keep going. Kids, don't drink vodka cocktails on an empty stomach.
I've been struggling for years with the essay form. Historically, more of my essays have been accepted for publication than my fiction. I used to think that was because I wrote good essays, but now I think it's possibly because my opinions are potent and I can argue them reasonably well, rather than because my essay writing has any intrinsic merit.
The thing I've been wondering is whether I'm approaching the style of my essays all wrong. When I'm on the writing highway and I decide on an essay topic I want to explore, I usually take the exit for straightforward, Wurtzel-type prose. I'm happy with it when I'm writing and revising, but when I go back and read it later, it lacks power, and it lacks me. Maybe the thing to do is keep driving until I find something that's between this blog voice, right here, and my more decorative, more subtle fiction voice. I don't rightly know what that would sound like.
And I am apprehensive about an essential task for a good creative nonfiction writer: eliding incidents and dialogue in order to tell a better story. The world always seems to slip sideways when I think about that. If I'm going to make up dialogue for her, since I can't remember exactly what she said, why not fabricate other stuff? I can pretend I was addicted to crack while I struggled to quit smoking. It'll punch up the whole experience considerably! I know intellectually that it's not all or nothing, but in practice...for me, there's the truth the way my brain recorded it, and then there's everything else. The line sits there, and all else is shades of fiction. Anything that goes on the page aside from the truth the way my brain recorded it feels dishonest, even if it's in service of the piece, or if it's harmless, or if it's a might-as-well-be situation, or all three.
When I began work on this essay, though - which uses the issue with my apartment complex to get at the problem of who's responsible for a woman's safety in public - I decided I'd try to tell it as if it was fiction. I determined I'd discard what didn't work in those parameters and sub in the closest truth I could. So far I think it's working, but then I really was quite tipsy when I left off in the middle. The alcohol helped me tie in an incident that I doubt I'd be brave enough to include when sober, so that particular brain damage is probably for the better.
I wrote another poem recently. I was doing yoga and I had a very particular sensation, and while in years past I would have rushed to my anonymous blog to describe it, I can't do that anymore. I could have recorded it in my paper journal, but I intuited that exploring it sideways, through the bits and pieces of language that writing poetry necessitates, would yield more interesting results than the narrative version I'd compose in a journal.
I'm very pleased with what came out. I still don't know what I'm doing writing poetry - I don't understand virtually anything about the mechanics, and I can't distinguish a good poem from a bad poem or understand why I like one and not another. But the revision is a bit more fun than with prose, because it's a lot less work to try six different synonyms and see what works than to rewrite entire pages or chapters. And I have pretty much no ambition at all with my poems. I write them to record and express, rather than to communicate or profit. Kind of a steam valve.
In reading news, I read 100 pages of Soon I Will Be Invincible and gave up. I don't know if I was misreading or if the editor was sloppy, but after the second really confusing situational hole - and when we were still doing flashbacks and backstory and totally static exposition after 100 pages - I couldn't hold any more faith with the author. I feel bad about this assessment, because the book was highly recommended to me, but that was what I read. If you are just desperately aching for a comic-book world in prose form, you'll probably see past what I saw, but Ready Player One did much of this better, if in a neighboring solar system.
And I read just the very first few pages of House of Leaves. Dunno. I'm withholding judgment for the moment.
On Thursday I started on an essay that's partially about a continuing low-level struggle I've been having with the property management of my apartment complex, but to paraphrase Adrian Mole, it's not really about that, it's very deep, it's about life and stuff like that. It seemed to be going well, but then I accidentally got too drunk to keep going. Kids, don't drink vodka cocktails on an empty stomach.
I've been struggling for years with the essay form. Historically, more of my essays have been accepted for publication than my fiction. I used to think that was because I wrote good essays, but now I think it's possibly because my opinions are potent and I can argue them reasonably well, rather than because my essay writing has any intrinsic merit.
The thing I've been wondering is whether I'm approaching the style of my essays all wrong. When I'm on the writing highway and I decide on an essay topic I want to explore, I usually take the exit for straightforward, Wurtzel-type prose. I'm happy with it when I'm writing and revising, but when I go back and read it later, it lacks power, and it lacks me. Maybe the thing to do is keep driving until I find something that's between this blog voice, right here, and my more decorative, more subtle fiction voice. I don't rightly know what that would sound like.
And I am apprehensive about an essential task for a good creative nonfiction writer: eliding incidents and dialogue in order to tell a better story. The world always seems to slip sideways when I think about that. If I'm going to make up dialogue for her, since I can't remember exactly what she said, why not fabricate other stuff? I can pretend I was addicted to crack while I struggled to quit smoking. It'll punch up the whole experience considerably! I know intellectually that it's not all or nothing, but in practice...for me, there's the truth the way my brain recorded it, and then there's everything else. The line sits there, and all else is shades of fiction. Anything that goes on the page aside from the truth the way my brain recorded it feels dishonest, even if it's in service of the piece, or if it's harmless, or if it's a might-as-well-be situation, or all three.
When I began work on this essay, though - which uses the issue with my apartment complex to get at the problem of who's responsible for a woman's safety in public - I decided I'd try to tell it as if it was fiction. I determined I'd discard what didn't work in those parameters and sub in the closest truth I could. So far I think it's working, but then I really was quite tipsy when I left off in the middle. The alcohol helped me tie in an incident that I doubt I'd be brave enough to include when sober, so that particular brain damage is probably for the better.
I wrote another poem recently. I was doing yoga and I had a very particular sensation, and while in years past I would have rushed to my anonymous blog to describe it, I can't do that anymore. I could have recorded it in my paper journal, but I intuited that exploring it sideways, through the bits and pieces of language that writing poetry necessitates, would yield more interesting results than the narrative version I'd compose in a journal.
I'm very pleased with what came out. I still don't know what I'm doing writing poetry - I don't understand virtually anything about the mechanics, and I can't distinguish a good poem from a bad poem or understand why I like one and not another. But the revision is a bit more fun than with prose, because it's a lot less work to try six different synonyms and see what works than to rewrite entire pages or chapters. And I have pretty much no ambition at all with my poems. I write them to record and express, rather than to communicate or profit. Kind of a steam valve.
In reading news, I read 100 pages of Soon I Will Be Invincible and gave up. I don't know if I was misreading or if the editor was sloppy, but after the second really confusing situational hole - and when we were still doing flashbacks and backstory and totally static exposition after 100 pages - I couldn't hold any more faith with the author. I feel bad about this assessment, because the book was highly recommended to me, but that was what I read. If you are just desperately aching for a comic-book world in prose form, you'll probably see past what I saw, but Ready Player One did much of this better, if in a neighboring solar system.
And I read just the very first few pages of House of Leaves. Dunno. I'm withholding judgment for the moment.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Discerning the Truth
SO YEAH, California. Just like Jimmy in The Wizard. Califooooornia. If I'm lucky I'll get to play Super Mario 3 and see the big fake dinosaurs. [1]
But that's not what I want to talk about today, folks. I want to mudpuddle around in a Topic instead. I read this article this morning about David Sedaris, and the wee problem that some of his stories might not be strictly true. It's the latest in a long line of articles I've read about memoir authors not sticking perfectly to facts, a topic I never seem to get tired of reading about. This fascinating article/book review about fact-checking is probably the most memorable one for me, mostly because of the third-to-last paragraph turning the whole thing on its head. It's a subtopic for another day, but that article did 75% of the work of convincing me that I can't be a professional writer of nonfiction, not even essays. I don't "massage" very well.
I believe in truth. It's the bedrock of how I live. One of the most startling compliments I've ever gotten was Matt telling me that I have a relationship to the truth that's well out of the ordinary. Part of why I love fiction so much is my devotion to truth - I believe that fiction shows us truth that only the absolute best writers of nonfiction can convey. Life is hardly ever all one thing or another, and I think nonfiction tends to need to sweep people and their actions down into specific drawers, labeled clearly, where they can be stored and safe. Fiction has the power to show us our myriad facets by showing us many characters; one of the best realizations I ever made was seeing that the five main characters in Fraggle Rock, a big influence on my childhood, are five different aspects of pretty much any personality [2], all of which we need to call upon at different times in our lives.
I'm addicted to the articles on Longform.org, because they tend to take the time to really explore all the sides of a person or an issue. Virtually never are real human people just evil or just good or just bigoted or just pitiable. [3] When you have several thousand words to kick around, it means you have the time to explore all the available contradictions, which is invaluable to people who read.
So when I find out that writers mix the truth with not-quite-the-truth and market their work as nonfiction, I'm never sure what to think. The James Frey thing made me a little mad, but mostly thoughtful, because although I think Frey himself is a pretty poor poster child for this sort of thing - his fiction factory disgusts me, and I don't enjoy his work - the inner issue remains compelling. If people read his book, felt something, were moved, does it matter that those feelings were brought on by falsehoods? Is it appropriate to feel cheated by an emotional experience that was true if the inspiration for the experience was not?
But that's not what I want to talk about today, folks. I want to mudpuddle around in a Topic instead. I read this article this morning about David Sedaris, and the wee problem that some of his stories might not be strictly true. It's the latest in a long line of articles I've read about memoir authors not sticking perfectly to facts, a topic I never seem to get tired of reading about. This fascinating article/book review about fact-checking is probably the most memorable one for me, mostly because of the third-to-last paragraph turning the whole thing on its head. It's a subtopic for another day, but that article did 75% of the work of convincing me that I can't be a professional writer of nonfiction, not even essays. I don't "massage" very well.
I believe in truth. It's the bedrock of how I live. One of the most startling compliments I've ever gotten was Matt telling me that I have a relationship to the truth that's well out of the ordinary. Part of why I love fiction so much is my devotion to truth - I believe that fiction shows us truth that only the absolute best writers of nonfiction can convey. Life is hardly ever all one thing or another, and I think nonfiction tends to need to sweep people and their actions down into specific drawers, labeled clearly, where they can be stored and safe. Fiction has the power to show us our myriad facets by showing us many characters; one of the best realizations I ever made was seeing that the five main characters in Fraggle Rock, a big influence on my childhood, are five different aspects of pretty much any personality [2], all of which we need to call upon at different times in our lives.
I'm addicted to the articles on Longform.org, because they tend to take the time to really explore all the sides of a person or an issue. Virtually never are real human people just evil or just good or just bigoted or just pitiable. [3] When you have several thousand words to kick around, it means you have the time to explore all the available contradictions, which is invaluable to people who read.
So when I find out that writers mix the truth with not-quite-the-truth and market their work as nonfiction, I'm never sure what to think. The James Frey thing made me a little mad, but mostly thoughtful, because although I think Frey himself is a pretty poor poster child for this sort of thing - his fiction factory disgusts me, and I don't enjoy his work - the inner issue remains compelling. If people read his book, felt something, were moved, does it matter that those feelings were brought on by falsehoods? Is it appropriate to feel cheated by an emotional experience that was true if the inspiration for the experience was not?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)