Writing Real Life Fiction
Two things to make a story both interesting and realistic: write about what you are interested in and write about what you know.
I’ve written about ten stories over the past two years and they all suck and then my wife gave me the advice above. So, what interests me?
- Robots
- Tattoos
- Music
- Books
- Political Theory
- Satire
- Corrupt Media
- Ignorant Americans
- Corrupt Corporate Power Structures
- Religious Fanatics
- Dystopias
The above list makes it harder for me to deny that my writing (I am currently working on writing my first novel, a dystopian book that is about a father and daughter running from religious fanatics) will become typecast to the genre field of Science Fiction. For a long time I struggled with this idea, in fact, I still do.
I have this romantic notion that there is a David Foster Wallace or Michael Chabon, or even if I dare, a Don DeLillo in me waiting to burst forth from my cocoon and put something to paper that is riveting and awesome. A piece of writing that will take people by surprise and spark a flurry of excellent critiques from The New Yorker. My writings will appear in The Paris Review and literary critics notable books of the year lists. I will then get offers to teach creative writing classes at off beat liberal arts colleges around the country that offer me a small town/big community feel (see, Wonder Boys). I will win the National Book Award and start to spend my time with Chabon, Cunningham, Boyle, etc.
Only then I realize that to write lit fiction is to give a part of me (and my family) up because I do have my share of familial drama that I could tap into to write about what I know. Only here’s the catch (and because I have started and stopped so many different blogs this year I can’t remember when I first said it anymore) fiction is a media market just like television and movies. What is marketable about familial drama? I mean fuck, everyone has family tension, and there are millions of potential writers out there who want to write about how their fucked up relationship with their parents made them suck at committing to another human being. Is that all I got? Really? Yes, I am being a bit glib about the state of lit fiction but a new writer doesn’t have a lot of options right now, especially if what they have to offer is what is already being written, and let’s face it, being written by better by bigger names who will sell the book.
So I am left with my first list of things that are interesting to me, things I am passionate about, things that I would not be chagrined at having my real name attached to. So I am going to continue what I am calling the Sci-Fi Project. The story is really simple: father abandons his three year old daughter for selfish reasons. The country goes to shit and she has a runaway from home complex that is itching and finds her real father years later only by sheer happenstance. The sci-fi comes in because it is set in the future where the US is quietly overthrown by religious fanatics who institute (unbeknown to the vast majority of Americans) a theocracy and one of their pet peeves – tattoos – are outlawed. Outrageously impossible? Maybe, but so are FTL drives, warp speed, light speed, etc. at this point.
I have always felt that dystopian lit has never been about what is possible, or even probable, it is a tale about what our attitudes are at the time the author is writing it. The ban on tattoos idea came for two reasons: 1) I love tattoos and am slowly covering my body with them and 2) when I went to a Christian private school my 5th grade teacher spent some time bad mouthing tattoos and pulled out support from the Bible to back up her diatribe against the art.
Then the election protests started to happen in Iran and it got me thinking, what happened if no one showed up to the protests and a usurpation of civil liberties and the thin line between the Church and the State became nonexistent? How might the religious zealots pull that off in our country? One easy step might be to keep the major media distracted; the “independent” media can be made out to be filled with cooks who believe 9/11 was an inside job, etc.
So with my ideas and focus looking toward the improbable if not impossible future I sit down and write. At times I wonder if this is how Bradbury developed Fahrenheit 451 and it makes me feel warm and bubbly inside.
