The truth about fiction
Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of at the time that we are reading. As with love, politics, or friendship: readiness is all. […] Which is perhaps as it should be. The inner life is nourished only if it gets what it needs when it needs it.
From The Situation and The Story, by Vivian Gornick.
Since childhood, I have turned to books (and, by extension, magazine articles and now the Web) to find answers to all kinds of questions, even if sometimes I didn’t even know these questions where in me. A strange set of circumstances would put an article in my hands and I would be shocked to find out that the author echoed a feeling or a thought I had and reading would bring the issue into light for me.
In the last few months, I have been working on a screenplay for a feature film (fiction) based on a true story. The producers have made it clear that the movie’s first goal is to be entertaining (and therefore successful) and that new plot twists and characters can be introduced if needed. Still, I did extensive research on the true story at the base of the screenplay and I have met the people who will become the main characters of the film. Because of that procedure and also because I am a blogger, I am very interested these days about the subject of truth in writing, especially where it pertains to non-fiction writing, such as memoirs and essays.
Well, lucky me, this subject seems to be highly fashionable in the literary world these days, and I keep running into articles that cover the various aspects of this problematic. Don’t be surprised if this subject comes back often in my blog over the next few months. I’m also considering the creation of a new section of this blog just for this subject, hoping I’m not the only one interested by it! Plus, it will be a good way for me to gather all this information in a single spot.
I had the surprise this morning to find out that my favorite non-fiction writer, the author of the quote above, was put on the spot recently for admitting to having taken some liberties with the facts and characters in her memoirs and articles. Vivian Gornick finds herself in a strange spot since she’s considered a specialist of the non-fiction genre, both as an author and a scholar. I recently finished her last book called The Situation and The Story: the art of personal narrative, which I highly recommend to bloggers who do more than gather links. She nevers mentions blogs in her writing, but everything she says about the importance of finding the voice of the narrator applies to web writing. For example, this passage about literature seems to explain the current rise of interest for blogs:
To begin with, modernism has run its course and left us stripped of the pleasures of narrative: a state of reading affairs that has grown oppressive. For many years now our novels have been all voice: a voice speaking to us from inside its own emotional space, anchored neither in plot nor in circumstances. […]
As the 20th century wore on, and the sound of voice alone grew less compelling – its insights repetitive, its wisdom wearisome – the longing for narration rose up again, asserting the oldest claim on the reading heart, the measure of whose deprivation is to be taken in the literalism of the newly returned « tale ». What, after all, could be more literal than The Story of My Life now being told by Everywoman and Everyman?
Is it okay for Gornick, who writes about the importance of a reliable narrator, to have created composite characters in her own memoir? Is it okay for bloggers to make up stories about themselves or at least to embellish the truth? And what is the long term impact on literature if facts and fiction keep getting confused (though surely, that is nothing new)?
Once again, I will use Gornick to answer this question, at least partially:
But memoir is neither testament nor fable or analytic transcription. A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual event; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happens to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to « make » of what happened.