I've never had a lot of family, and my friends have filled those voids for me. Which is good, because it seems like the family members I can manage to coexist with are far away or passed away.
I know I've been quiet on the blog lately, and it is all a struggle within my mind. There are good days and bad days and days when I wish I wasn't me and days that I wouldn't be anyone else for anything.
My home has always been within fiction. The stories I want to share are always bubbling free. The problem is that the story I want to tell these days isn't fiction. That said, I abhor memoirs. And yet as I turn the pieces together, nothing else will fit. Some stories do not translate to fiction. I also refuse to go the route of saying, "Here, read this pile of fifteen stories to understand." And it would take an unknown number of stories, because fiction simply doesn't translate the same way nonfiction does. Coherence of story matters. (At least, to me.)
The other struggle with writing a memoir is that I don't remember everything. I see flashes here and flashes there and only creative nonfiction would fill in the gaps necessary to make it understandable.
Is it worth telling a story that gets more complicated the more you remember? It's bad enough a friend of mine looked at me this week and simply stated, "You're complicated." I'm pretty sure that isn't a compliment, but thanks, dude. Doesn't matter if I try to be an open book, if I try to be someone simple. It doesn't work for me.
Honesty may be the best policy, but less can also be more. Simple questions should have simple answers. I know it always frustrated my father when he would ask me questions that seemed like it would have a yes or no answer, and I'd come back with something like green. All I can say is, it made sense at the time. To me, and me alone.
This month, today, both are significant to me. I struggle with mental illness, and the first signs of it (at least, confirmed from someone outside myself) were about seventeen years ago this month. Diagnosis followed slowly, about seven years ago. It's forever, and yet it's yesterday. I know I've been irrational with a side of paranoia lately, and I'm hoping to move past that for a time. How much is always unclear.
Maybe the memoir idea will fade and I'll be able to concentrate on editing that story I've been meaning to finish.
I saw a quote today by Terri Main. "You are a writer. The 'normal' ship sailed without you long ago."
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Friday, July 19, 2013
Friday, May 3, 2013
Get Out of My Fantasies!
No, not really. I write them to share them, but I find it odd when people assume that since I write erotica it must mean something specific.
What I often get is someone assumes that he or she is in that fantasy that I have. But that would mean that every single story I write is a fantasy of mine. And that I only fantasize about people I know. Or possibly that I have attempted every single thing I've written about...
Whoa. Just stop right there. I can't even continue on that line of thought any longer.
I write stories. They are fiction. The people held within them are also fiction. There is a disclaimer on many fiction books that proclaims all events and characters are made up. The beauty of making everything up is that there are no restrictions to where they can go. A piece of writing advice passed around so many is "Write what you know." While that is fine, there is also a point where you have to change things or be forever paralyzed by what someone else, a real person, would actually do. That doesn't work in fiction, because the rules require a fiction story to make sense, to have a point, to come to a conclusion and not simply fizzle into oblivion.
Sometimes, pieces of a person I know or something that really happened might spark an idea to create a character or to shape an event or to twist a plot. Those pieces are harder for me, because it takes me a long time when I rewrite them to make them fictional rather than representations of someone or something real.
I think I need to get that tattooed on my hand, so the next time someone says 'that's me' I can just flash them an explanation without getting that annoyed tone of voice when I explain, no, it isn't about you. Remember that for any writer you meet, whether she is writing science fiction or he's into literary prose or someone else mentions romance. It isn't about you, or anyone else in the writer's life.
Somewhere between sometimes and often, it isn't even about the writer. Those story bits are so close to us because we created them. Yet like children, they have to go and live lives of their own.
What I often get is someone assumes that he or she is in that fantasy that I have. But that would mean that every single story I write is a fantasy of mine. And that I only fantasize about people I know. Or possibly that I have attempted every single thing I've written about...
Whoa. Just stop right there. I can't even continue on that line of thought any longer.
I write stories. They are fiction. The people held within them are also fiction. There is a disclaimer on many fiction books that proclaims all events and characters are made up. The beauty of making everything up is that there are no restrictions to where they can go. A piece of writing advice passed around so many is "Write what you know." While that is fine, there is also a point where you have to change things or be forever paralyzed by what someone else, a real person, would actually do. That doesn't work in fiction, because the rules require a fiction story to make sense, to have a point, to come to a conclusion and not simply fizzle into oblivion.
Sometimes, pieces of a person I know or something that really happened might spark an idea to create a character or to shape an event or to twist a plot. Those pieces are harder for me, because it takes me a long time when I rewrite them to make them fictional rather than representations of someone or something real.
I think I need to get that tattooed on my hand, so the next time someone says 'that's me' I can just flash them an explanation without getting that annoyed tone of voice when I explain, no, it isn't about you. Remember that for any writer you meet, whether she is writing science fiction or he's into literary prose or someone else mentions romance. It isn't about you, or anyone else in the writer's life.
Somewhere between sometimes and often, it isn't even about the writer. Those story bits are so close to us because we created them. Yet like children, they have to go and live lives of their own.
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