Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Don't assume you know what I'm writing . . .

A friend recently gave me a copy of an essay she’d come across about the all-too-common situation of a writer meeting someone for the first time who seems to know everything there is to know about her. This, the writer said, is the danger of being honest on paper (or in cyberspace). Everyone seems to think they know you.

Long before I published my first novel, Murder in Mellingham (1993), I listened to a woman at a cocktail party (if she hadn’t had already two drinks the conversation might have been different) vent over the use of her surname by our local famous writer, John Updike. She felt violated. Unfortunately, her last name was fairly common because the family had been around for quite a while. But I got her point.

No one wants to pick up a book and read what seems to be her life story, or an excerpt from it, in someone else’s novel or essay. We feel that our lives are our own property, and that means keeping them to ourselves when we’re not sharing the tantalizing details with our friends old and new. It’s one thing to share a tale of woe with the new family on the block at a buffet welcoming them, but it’s entirely different to read about it in an essay on line—when you learn too late that the new woman writes for a regional newspaper.

Equally discomfiting is taking questions after a book talk and having one woman in the audience ask if the character in chapter 7 is your mother. I got this question from a woman of the same age as my mother, and I assured her the character wasn’t my mother. Years later I went back to that chapter and reread it, and then I understood why she asked.

I’ve had similar questions about other characters, locations, and murder victims. One woman sidled up to me after a talk and said, “That’s so-and-so who gets killed, isn’t it?” She simply wouldn’t believe me when I said no. Another reader informed me she knew exactly where I set a certain novel because she lived just down the street from where the victim died. I had to tell her she was nowhere near close, but she insisted she was, and then said, “I understand why you don’t want anyone to know where you set the story. It wouldn’t look good. Better not to say.” One acquaintance came right out and told me, “Never tell anyone where this is set.” I have no idea why.

There is no doubt that sometimes a detail from someone else’s life is tossed into the mix of a character or scene, but it’s only one part of the whole. In a short story soon to be published by Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, “Variable Winds,” a young woman sets sail on what is meant to be her very last trip. I based the story on my own experiences sailing with my family when I was growing up. Everything in that story happened, but not all at once and not all to me alone in that boat.

The story led to a novel. In Come About for Murder, Chief Joe Silva teaches his stepson, Philip, to sail. The plot involves a lot of detail about the harbor and bay. I know someone is going to come up to me and tell me they remember taking that sail with me, or that a new house has been built and removed the dock. They’ll share their sailing stories, including the disasters, and then say, “You can use that if you want.”

Readers often hear writers talk about the isolation of this line of work. But the flip side is the unexpected and presumed intimacy that develops between reader and writer. When the writer puts feeling on the page, the reader enters into another world. When she closes the book, she takes a new familiarity with her. But as real as the created world is to both individuals, it isn’t reality. When you meet a writer, that is the time to listen and discover who is that person who created another world so vivid and lifelike. That is the time to understand how different book and creator can be.

For the original article, “Pretend You Don’t Know Me,” by Dani Shapiro go to  http://preview.tinyurl.com/zv9sl7y

14 comments:

  1. What an interesting essay. People do make so many assumptions about writers.

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    1. So true, Julia. I'm continually amazed at what people will say to me. But it is a lesson on how differently people can think about the same experience.

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  2. In one of my early romances (years ago), I created a situation in a fictitious small town (one very much like the small town I lived near). The situation was totally made up. At least I thought it was. After the book was published, a reader came up to me and told me she knew exactly what I was writing about and went on to explain. Strange part was the reality and the fiction were almost identical.

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  3. Yes, that's scary, isn't it, Maris! I sometimes think we have ESP and we're just channeling what's going on around us. Thanks for adding that.

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  4. A few times I've reread something I wrote long ago and see that I used the same plot point again. So I guess it's possible a reader could read one story, then another, and think what I wrote had to be real. But it never is, unless I use an actual setting. Which we are allowed to do. It's the characters' actions that are made up, usually a combination of many people we know or have read about. Great post, Susan. Obviously hard to persuade anyone that they're wrong, even when the author tells them they are.

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  5. I think being a writer requires a special kind of courage--to be misunderstood, criticized over everything, misread, and misrepresented. If we didn't have such strong minds (and imaginations) we'd probably all deflate and turn to dust.

    I like your analysis of how things happen in composing a story, and where to draw some of the lines. Thanks for adding those.

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  6. This happens especially with my Marienstadt books! People from my home town are always telling me that they recognized this or that character. Sometimes I don't even know the person that they have decided it is based on.

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  7. I'm not surprised you get this kind of thing a lot. I suppose that's a good reason to live elsewhere. It would be hard to have people coming up to you all the time to talk about the way you created characters out of their neighbors. Thanks for commenting.

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  8. You are so right. Someone will take totally different experiences away from a book, but I had not thought of them thinking you'd meant them to incorrectly see it the way they did. Fiction is a fiction world for both writer and reader. I will look for your Alfred Hitchcock story coming out soon. I subscribe to the magazine and always looking for a familiar author name.

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    1. Linda, I was thinking of the ways readers attribute my autobiography to certain parts of the story. If they were interpreting a character differently from how I presented him, that's fine, as long as they don't tell me that's really my father or my cousin or someone they think I know. The lesson for me is to remember just how invested readers can be, and that's fine. But, as you say, it's fiction--for both reader and writer. Thanks for adding that. The story is in the October issue (out in August).

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  9. I do tend to mix real details with imagined ones in my writing. Some situations are totally fictitious but others are not.

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  10. Well, in that case, Jacquie, I'll have to take another look at your novels. ;-)) You could be giving away family secrets. I try to be very careful with not giving away anything that a relative or friend could consider personal. Thanks for commenting.

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  11. Very interesting (and true) post!
    Thanks for sharing
    Good luck and God's blessings
    PamT

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