Fictions

A few weeks ago I was so proud of myself. I wrote my first short story. Well, that’s not entirely true. I wrote two short stories in college and they were both terrible. One was a humorous ghost story I wrote at Sarah Lawrence and the other was an undergrad story so terrible it had no plot or subject that I can recall.

But anyway, this was a significant milestone in that I’ve been struggling with my fictions since childhood when my friend Krissy and I embarked on our first novels at age 8. Unfortunately, we had no life experiences to cull from and so our epics petered out pretty quick.

In fact, my problem writing fiction goes back to that very young me, back to when I started doing what I call “calibrating towards reality,” in other words obsessively worrying that I am thinking from an unrealistic perspective.

It all started with a tween diagnosis of anorexia, most likely tripped off from a condition called body dysmorphia (although I wouldn’t know what that term was for another decade): an inability to correctly see with my own eyes what was in the mirror in front of me.

And this dutifully led to a distrustful questioning of anything I saw or experienced, basically. Great.

My “calibrations” developed like an over-correction and led to an irritating habit of always asking  surrounding people these things: “did that really happen?” or “are you seeing what I’m seeing” and basically disregarding, whole hog, experiences I have alone.

Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans just did a podcast this week about ghosts and I was thinking about whether or not I’ve had any ghostly experiences. And then I remembered I don’t believe the experiences I’ve had because there wasn’t any corroboration. There’s a mental bucket in my head for those experiences: questionable.

This calibrating is also a problem in some social situations. Like someone will be spouting off their fictions and I’ll say, “But that’s not how it happened” or “but that doesn’t make sense because…” or “but what about this other evidence that contradicts everything you’re saying?”

And then I think, “Oh crap, this person is just coping with their fictions right now or this person is just talking in marketing mode.” Leave them to their realities.

But then I think, “Wait a minute, we all have the same reality. There’s no point in the universe where their reality ends and mine begins.”

See? I can’t stop. It’s like a buffering wheel. It’s always going in my brain: “Is that right? What you’re saying?”

This is why I find deep fakes so terrifying. And why I’m hyper-sensitive to gaslighting. Stop trying to fuck up a very fucked-up experience I’m already having over here.

Anyway, here is where these calibrations have a detrimental effect on my attempts to write fiction:

Recently I was in Kansas City and I met up with my grade school friend Jayne from St. Louis. I hadn’t really had a conversation with Jayne since we started Junior High and went into separate social groups. So we had a lot of catching up to do over dinner. And at the end of the night, out in the parking lot as we were saying goodbye, she said something like, “What about that piano teacher we had, huh!” We then told our spouses the gory story and I told Jayne I was trying to write a short story about it but was struggling.

I had just recently come across a photo of this piano teacher and had looked up a newspaper article about the murder she was involved in. Because the story involved a real family, I didn’t want anything I wrote ever getting back to harm the survivors. So I decided to fictionalize everything. Easy enough. I made changes to some of the sexes of the characters, pumped up the sex drama (as you do), added some disguising plot points and boom, I was off to the races.

Except that after a little while I suddenly stopped and said to myself, “But that’s not how it happened.”

“Am I for real right now with this?” I thought. Of course that’s not how it happened. That’s the whole point of changing everything from how it happened, so that it wouldn’t be how it happened!

And so I’ve given up on that story for a while.

Telling stories doesn’t seem to be a problem for me if they’re based on reality and I’m depicting an ostensible reality, even if my memory fails me or I need to embellish for the sake of humor or someone’s privacy or, as my great-grandfather would say, to make it better than it was. Those kind of detours feel acceptable because I know the difference in my head. The core reality is clear and stories aren’t obligated.

I’ve also written two books of narrative poems and I’ve been trying to figure out what the difference is there. Why was I able to do that? My Mars poems aren’t a fully realized narrative, but instead little narratives tossed in among personal lyric poems. I was still figuring out how to write narrative poems back then and could only carry a story for the length of a poem. That seemed do-able.

The next book of cowboy poems was actually a fully-drawn out, start-to-finish plotted story. It took forever but again, living in those stories was accomplished poem by poem. I always thought I could transfer that trick to short stories or a novel.

But it’s not the same. Like at all. Those genres demand you be more immersive in their fictions. And that is not a very comfortable place for me to be.

There’s a common prescription in fiction to base characters on people you know, à la Proust. As part of a fiction exercise in a fiction writing guide, I tried to make my novel characters an amalgamation of poets and people I knew. And the result was the same exact mess. My brain kept wanting to default to one real person or another. “But so-in-so wouldn’t do that.”

The new short story had the benefit of being the product of a funny dream. I was able to basically transcribe the dream, clean it up and embellish it where needed. It was subconsciously delivered almost intact and that make all the difference.

I’m thinking the problem comes with stories based on even a semblance of a true story but are not true stories, per se. And I’m leaning toward the idea that I’m to be a Donald Barthelme kind of fiction writer, veering heavily toward nonsense. Because I’m not haunted by the idea of discovering folderol, the uncanny or ghostly things.

I’m haunted by the specter of reality.

Happy Halloween!