In both Novembers of 2022 and 2023 I wrote 50,000 words for the National Novel Writing Month challenge. The results were two sloppy, hastily written rough drafts of novels. I would expect nothing less from such a challenge, the purpose of which is not to write a masterpiece, but to spill out as quickly as possible the raw material for a potential novel. In this way, I was successful and felt good about that accomplishment. After all, the only other novels I had ever written (two of them) had each taken me about ten years to draft and revise. A novella I wrote took maybe five years. My first novel and that novella both reside in the proverbial box inside of a drawer, unpublished, likely never to be read. The other novel, self published in 2012, is out there, a print-on-demand situation, available for anyone who cares to read it for the foreseeable future.
I am thinking about giving up on writing fiction. Even though I sometimes get pleasure from reading my work in this genre and believe I have been successful in moments, the feeling of dissatisfaction is often greater than the pleasure. And I think there’s a few things going on there. One of those things (especially in my most recent efforts) seems to be an abundance of disguised autobiographical material. It’s as if I find it difficult (or uninteresting) to “make up” stories. My imagination seems to want to recycle and refurbish actual lived or witnessed experience. I write about shit that I have done or seen or thought, and I hide it in a world I don’t know very well and give these experiences to characters with names and jobs that are not mine. That’s all well and good, you might say. All fiction writers do that, to a degree. But there’s this niggling voice in my own head that keeps wondering, well, if most of this material is autobiographical, why aren’t you just writing memoir? Why do you have to dress this stuff up as if it’s not really about you? Won’t anyone who reads this stuff, if it ever sees the light of day, wonder about or speculate about its autobiographical origins? In a public place, at a reading, say, (again, given that it’s ever published), wouldn’t people ask? or just assume? And wouldn’t it be more authentic or honest to write non-fiction about the same kinds of subject matter? So that’s one thing–if the subject matter I’m most drawn to is this play between my own lived experience and the interiority of that experience, why am I writing fiction?
Perhaps, it is so that I can disguise the ugly underbelly. I can write about myself, family, friends, and acquaintances and no one will ever know. You know the drill: “The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to people living or dead are coincidental.” We read this at the front of every novel we ever pick up. It is a way the writer has of giving him or herself carte blanche to tell the truth about themselves and about people they know without consequence. They will pretend to have “made up” these stories. And the only people who would ever know are the people these stories are about–most of whom will never read them! So there’s that. I can write about the drama in the lives of my siblings with almost 100% assurance that none of them (as non-readers of literature and barely interested in my creative work) will ever know what I have done. I can write about my own embarrassing proclivities and assign them to some other imagined persona and, voila, suddenly I can write about my deepest and darkest secrets! Not that my secrets are all that dark–just awkward.
I also have this tendency, when writing stories that draw heavily from my life, to accompany them with utterly fantastical conceits: an epidemic of spontaneous human combustion, a family of monsters, or a finger puppet performance of Hamlet. Why are these things necessary? The impulse toward fantasy or surrealism or absurdity wants to sort of wedge itself into whatever realistic story I want to tell. Is it a bug or a feature? I enjoy doing that stuff, it entertains me and others, but when I put on my most self-critical hat, I conclude that it’s more bug than feature.
Outside of the wacky conceits, there are often characters, scenes, plot-points that I have invented whole cloth. Isolate those moments, though, and I’m not sure these fabrications, these additions to the fictive world I have conjured, are all that interesting or could stand alone without autobiographical infusion. Could it be that the intersection between the invented and the actual is the gas that keeps the story going?
So, ultimately, I realize that I could write about the things I find most intriguing and vital in non-fiction narrative or in essay form as long as I am brave enough. Additionally, I have found over the last decade and through five hundred and forty-four pieces, that poetry provides a ready and enthusiastic receptacle for nearly every conceivable idea or subject matter. So there are readily available forms to house whatever writer inclinations I may have at any given moment. But, having said all of this, the storytelling bug, the inventive bug, the urge toward the fantastical continues to rear its head inside of my creative compulsions.
Am I answering my own questions? Am I providing a rationale for continuing to write fiction rather than a defense of giving up the endeavor? And here I am on the cusp of another National Novel Writing Month in which I find myself determined once again to participate, this time, by soliciting titles from one of my good writer buddies. These titles, I hope, might steer me away from what I know and perhaps bring me closer to a fiction writing practice that I have always admired but never really achieved: the practice of pure invention.
Stay tuned to this channel for the results of the experiment.
michael jarmer 