Adventures in Memory: On Searching for Truth by Writing Fiction

As a fiction writer, I’ve always felt compelled, memoir style, to pore over my life’s timeline. But in a novel, I can erase, revise, smash, crash, reconstruct, and transfigure that squiggly narrative. A novel has no obligation to mirror or represent anything familiar, recognizable, or real. And one of the main rules of play is that it doesn’t have to be true. Does this mean it can’t be? In 2015, I registered for a five-day program in fiction at a writer’s conference. But then I heard that the memoir workshop was strictly generative, writing instead of reading each other’s work. I wasn’t in the mood to read or be read. But before I switched, I hesitated. Would the memoirists expect me to tell the truth? I’m suspicious of the truth and writers who claim to have speared it. Stories about our own lives are slippery fish. I made the jump, and the instructor led us through a rotation of playful writing prompts and revision exercises. Timed bursts of stream-of-consciousness writing, meditation breaks, sharing and swapping passages with a partner (GOD NO), cutting up our manuscripts, then gluing them back together in a jumble. For me, these adventures in memory, chaos, and confession were the creative equivalent of medieval medicine: cupping, the applying of leeches, the letting of blood. I loved it. I’m suspicious of the truth and writers who claim to have speared it. Stories about our own lives are slippery fish. We drew maps of settings we remembered, or almost remembered, from our past. I sketched the floorplan of the master bathroom in my childhood home. It was an architecturally dysfunctional maze that connected my mother’s dressing room to my parents’ shared tub and shower, then to my dad and brother’s toilet and sink vanity, and the drawer where my father kept his pistol, finally opening onto my brother’s bedroom. I also drew a map of a submarine, which served as an eerie visual cousin to the warren of toilets and sinks just described. The submarine imagery grew from this map into the controlling metaphor of my debut […]

Click here to view original page at Adventures in Memory: On Searching for Truth by Writing Fiction

© 2023, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.