Turning into Story
Jun. 17th, 2011 01:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dedalus_1947“Somewhere along here
I became conscious of the feeling…
that comes when you first notice
your life turning into a story.”
(A River Runs Through It and Other Stories – Norman Maclean: 1976)
“So how do you spend your time?” they ask, suddenly very curious of my method for holding back what they perceive is the specter of boredom and apathy.
“Well,” I begin, innocently debating whether or not to be circumspect or candid in my response. “I babysit my granddaughter two days a week”, I say, usually deciding on an honest approach. “I volunteer at the county jail another day, and I do chores around the house. I also spend time writing, taking photographs, and working on a vinyl music project”.
Now if I heard that response, I’d probably be curious about the vinyl music project, but that is not the case with most people. A larger number of questioners tend to focus in on my writing.
“Writing,” they exclaim, “that’s interesting!”
My ears perk up at that particular word, which I’ve come to suspect, when said in a slightly exaggerated manner, is actually code for, Writing, isn’t that what we all learned to do in the third grade? The next predictable question is, “What do you write about?”
“Oh, I keep a journal,” I reply, hesitantly, fearing that we are now spiraling down a dreaded rabbit-hole with this line of questioning, “and I write a blog.”
“Oh, a blog,” they respond in a raised tone that seems to translate into, Oh God, not an Internet blogger! Just what the world needs – another opinionated, narcissistic writer spouting his views and beliefs on the Internet. “That’s great”, they continue, soothingly, “but are you thinking of writing a novel or a book?”
That question signals the end of a viable conversation for me, and I try changing the subject to something about them.
“No,” I might say, if I was talking to an educator, “I don’t think I’m ready for a book or novel yet, but I have been doing some reading about the new superintendent and his plans for next year. What do you think of him, and how is your school reacting to his ideas?” If the person is not in the teaching profession, I’ll switch to a story or news item I heard mentioned on NBC’s Today Show, or Fox’s Good Day L.A. Those two shows always give me something to discuss, instead of my writing, or why I’m not working on a book or novel with all of my free time.
I’ve been writing a blog called The Dedalus Log for about six years now. I don’t consider it a web log in the classic sense – that is, it’s not a series of short, concise, and humorous commentary about my life, current events, and popular culture. At first, I suppose I started writing the Dedalus Log more as a form of mental health therapy rather than art. It was a way to express my feelings and examine my reactions to the events I was facing in 2005: being reassigned to a new school as principal, after 10 years at one site; dealing with professional struggles and conflicts with staff and parents; and anticipating my pending retirement. As time went on this motive for writing changed, and I started using my blog as writing practice, a method of exercising my writing skills by creating, polishing, and posting long essays about my life, friends, and family. I fended off the occasional bouts of self-doubt over my abilities, and slowly started believing that I was getting better, and that one day, I might be ready for the ultimate challenge – writing fiction.
Ah, fiction, that lofty, literary genre sometimes referred to as creative writing. Since my American literature days in high school and college, I was evangelized to believe that real authors created art by telling stories and writing fiction. Journalism, and non-fiction were merely stepping-stones to the Holy Grail of literature - a novel. Even though I enjoyed well-written history books, and esteemed readable authors like Barbara Tuchman, William Manchester, and David Halberstam, they couldn’t compare to my pantheon of novelist-heroes, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, or John Steinbeck. I just assumed that if I kept practicing, I would eventually evolve into a fiction writer. But nothing happened! Over the course of six years, I experimented with dialogue in some stories, and even tried writing a blog from a third-person perspective once, but the desire to write a fictional tale never came. Whenever friends or relatives who read my blog asked if I was thinking of a novel, I just said I wasn’t ready – but that was only a half-truth. I was beginning to doubt my ability to tell a story. My biggest clue was the fact that I can’t tell a joke. Oh, I enjoyed hearing a good one, and I loved to laugh, but I never succeeded at making one up, or remembering and repeating one I heard. My daughter Prisa, who witnessed my futile humorous attempts all her life, explained it this way:
“Dad, you’re only funny when you don’t mean to be”.
The sting of truth is sharp, especially when it comes from the mouths of babes. I was beginning to suspect that my comic flaw signaled a bigger truth – what if I could only tell stories when I didn’t mean to? Is that what I was doing in my essays and personal narratives? Adding to my concern was the growing realization that I actually liked my style of writing. Personal essays were a natural and comfortable genre for me. I probably would have remained a closet essayist, maintaining the pretense of being a novelist-in-training, if I hadn’t read a story by Norman Maclean and heard Sarah Vowell speak in a BookTV appearance for her latest book.
I loved Robert Redford’s movie, A River Runs Through It, when I saw it in 1992. It was a poetic tribute to fly-fishing, and a compelling story about the two sons of a Presbyterian minister, who struggle with family, responsibility, and death in Montana of the early 1900’s. As often happens when I’m intrigued by a movie, I eventually read the semi-autobiographical novella by Norman Maclean, on which the movie was based. It was there that I learned that Maclean, who taught Shakespeare and the Romantic poets at the University of Chicago for 42 years, only began writing the stories of his youth after he retired. He published A River Runs Through It and Other Stories in 1976, at the age of 74. His only other work was the posthumously published Young Men and Fire, a non-fiction account of the Mann Gulch forest fire tragedy of 1949. Norman Maclean became the model and testament to the quixotic idea that I could write when I retired – and even dream of being published. However, it wasn’t until this past summer that I finally got around to reading the other two short stories in his collection, and was shocked into stillness by two passages that helped clarify the relationship between real life and stories. In USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky, Maclean wrote:
“Somewhere along here I became conscious of the feeling… that comes when you first notice your life turning into a story.”
“I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature – not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.
These passages struck a chord with me, because they helped explain what I was trying to do in my essays, and assured me that I was on the right track. I wasn’t writing fiction or making up imaginary stories. I was simply describing the real actions and honest events of the people around me, and sometimes they turned into stories. I’ve always harbored the belief that our lives could be seen as stories, if we had the ability to step back for a moment and examine them. The best example of this was when I discussed childhood incidents with my son and daughter, and heard them narrated back to me as stories. Writing always helped me create a distance between human actions and their consequences, and it gave me the time to understand what was happening and see the story it told. We remember stories better than a timeline of the events, fears, and reactions that constitute our life, and, as Maclean pointed out, the ones we remember best sometimes become literature.
Although Maclean’s passages about life and story were encouraging, I still harbored the uneasy sense that non-fiction was a second rate genre, until I happened across Sarah Vowell. Many of you may not be familiar with Sarah Jane Vowell. Wikipedia describes her as “an American author, journalist, essayist, and social commentator. She has written five nonfiction books on American history and culture, and was a contributing editor for the radio program This American Life on National Public Radio (NPR) from 1996-2008, where she produced numerous commentaries and documentaries, and toured the country in many of the program’s live shows. She was also the voice of Violet in the animated film, The Incredibles.” I first heard her unique, pixie-like voice on an episode of This American Life, and was immediately charmed by her insightful commentary and self-mocking humor. I again heard her on NPR when she was publicizing a book she had written on the Puritans called The Wordy Shipmates. Last month I happened to catch her latest BookTV appearance in Austin, Texas, where she was promoting her book on Hawaii, called Unfamiliar Fishes. During the Question and Answer period there was an interesting exchange that shed some light on my hang-up over the superiority of fiction over non-fiction. The dialogue went something like this:
– I’ve read and love all your books, but have you ever entertained the idea of writing fiction?
– No, I’m not a liar. That question comes up a lot. It’s such an insult to non-fiction. Just because something is true doesn’t make it boring. What I love about non-fiction is that it doesn’t need to be plausible, because it’s already true. Fiction is too easy. Could you imagine this: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, writers of the Declaration of Independence, originally friends and then life-long, bitter, political enemies, dying within hours of each other, on the same day – July 4th. You can’t make this stuff up! Fiction, humph!
I had never heard a more personal and enthusiastic defense of non-fiction. Vowell’s words put a glow on the rest of my day. She saw a world where real people and real events were infinitely more interesting, funny, and suspenseful than imaginary ones. I couldn’t help agreeing. I think that with the help of writers such as Vowell and Maclean I may eventually get over my fiction complex, and let my writing find its own course.
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Vowell
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