Narrative lives...
Feb. 27th, 2003 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitchen_kinkSomewhere in this great ticking wasteland of words in the ether I'm developing a story. There is something continuous here; there simply has to be.
All the time that I am complaining to myself that I am not writing, I am writing--here, in these pages, in this place. Am I somehow, unconsciously, writing the amorphous, novel/memoir/narrative of my life, waiting for the moment when the thread through it becomes clear, when the details cohese and become Story?
Here I chronicle thoughts on my day to day life. Not the point-by-point, what-I-did-today journaling of those who keep records, but also not the outpouring of angst and processing that my paper journal tends to be and has tended to be since middle school. What is this form? My dear friend R----- is struggling with a similar question: memoir-essayist? Is it fiction or nonfiction? Who decides?
At home nights I sometimes get the guts to write about my childhood, and that slowly weaves itself into the fabric as well. I find myself less and less interested in creating fictions that obliquely illustrate truths about my life, and more interested in my life itself, as parts of it recede further and further into the past. They say to write what you know, but what I know is often so close that the fictive result is a mash of contradictory actions and feelings: the character seems at best inconsistent, at worst, insane. How long before the narrative I make here can become fiction?
Is it true that I now have enough distance on my nine-year-old self to talk about the beach community I lived in, in the middle of winter, where the streets flooded and the nuclear power plant chugged white smoke a few miles offshore, bringing me nightmares?
Can I really write about my first kiss now, or the time on the bus, in high school, when the bully asked me to make an analysis of the firmness or softness of my breasts by comparing them to different kinds of food?
It is a strange thought, that perhaps I am reaching that moment of equilibrium, where I'm far enough into the interesting part of my life that the beginning of it stops hurting and wants to be told.
Who knows, though: it may prove to be interesting to no one but myself.
All the time that I am complaining to myself that I am not writing, I am writing--here, in these pages, in this place. Am I somehow, unconsciously, writing the amorphous, novel/memoir/narrative of my life, waiting for the moment when the thread through it becomes clear, when the details cohese and become Story?
Here I chronicle thoughts on my day to day life. Not the point-by-point, what-I-did-today journaling of those who keep records, but also not the outpouring of angst and processing that my paper journal tends to be and has tended to be since middle school. What is this form? My dear friend R----- is struggling with a similar question: memoir-essayist? Is it fiction or nonfiction? Who decides?
At home nights I sometimes get the guts to write about my childhood, and that slowly weaves itself into the fabric as well. I find myself less and less interested in creating fictions that obliquely illustrate truths about my life, and more interested in my life itself, as parts of it recede further and further into the past. They say to write what you know, but what I know is often so close that the fictive result is a mash of contradictory actions and feelings: the character seems at best inconsistent, at worst, insane. How long before the narrative I make here can become fiction?
Is it true that I now have enough distance on my nine-year-old self to talk about the beach community I lived in, in the middle of winter, where the streets flooded and the nuclear power plant chugged white smoke a few miles offshore, bringing me nightmares?
Can I really write about my first kiss now, or the time on the bus, in high school, when the bully asked me to make an analysis of the firmness or softness of my breasts by comparing them to different kinds of food?
It is a strange thought, that perhaps I am reaching that moment of equilibrium, where I'm far enough into the interesting part of my life that the beginning of it stops hurting and wants to be told.
Who knows, though: it may prove to be interesting to no one but myself.
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Re:
Date: 2003-02-28 11:51 am (UTC)Woo, strong words!
I didn't take any memoir writing or nonfiction at Emerson, but I'm well aware of the continual discussion of memoir vs. fiction, and the question, What is 'true'? I think that much of the memoir written today is intended to be fiction-like, and putting the name of 'memoir' on it just serves to telegraph to the reader that some version of what's in the book "really happened," or that they're using real names.
The stuff I've been writing, not in this journal, of late has been some adaptation of memory, using false names and changing details at my whim. Is it merely the "based on a true story" label that frustrates you? How do you figure that someone writing a memoir is staking a claim of higher literature, or higher importance, than a fiction tale?
Re:
Date: 2003-02-28 12:31 pm (UTC)I was talking to my class about this today, and the difference between "truth" and "fiction." Not everything which bill itself as "non-fiction" is true, necessarily. Memoir is non-fiction, technically, but it's no closer to truth than any other fiction. What you're writing is your life, made fictional, which I think has more value, in some ways, than a memoir.
Everything I write comes from my life in some way. Even if I'm writing about a scizophrenic homeless man, the characters and situations come from people and things I've observed or known. But memoir, deliberate, self proclaimed memoir, I think, degrades both fiction (by saying, in effect, "I'm more valueable because I'm 'true'") and non-fiction, by making truth a non-essential part of non-fiction.
Your mileage may vary. ;-)