Writing the Tough Stuff--Why and How

I’m on something of a class-visiting and other-writer-group visiting spree these days and here are the two questions I get asked most: first, how do I write about that? You know, that that. The thing that feels scary, shameful, embarrassing, terrifying to imagine out there in the world. And question two: My story involves other people who behaved badly—maybe very badly-- but who are still in my life. And who will not applaud having this badness revealed in a public space. How do you write that?

I get the questions, I realize, because I am a high-disclosure writer, which sounds better than saying I’m quite the blabbermouth, as we’d put it in my NJ. If we imagine a spectrum that has the wonderful but personally buttoned-up Annie Dillard on one end, I’d be pretty far in the other direction. I write not only about family stuff but about being bipolar, drug-dependent, a psychiatric survivor, and a person who experiences psychosis. A high school dropout. The book I have coming out next month (February) covers among other things sexual predation in a psychiatric hospital and shock treatment in my mid-teens.

The book—The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here—brings in consciousness studies and science, particularly physics. There’s a lot of interviews with scientists and discussion of some of the more fascinating work being done out there: can we say anything is objectively real? Does time exist? Does consciousness exist in the mind only or is it a larger force? I wrap the story of my own mind, what it does and what has been done to it, in these larger questions.

But does that make what I do better somehow? No. It’s just how my mind works. Stripped bare to themselves, these stories need to be told. As do yours. As an editor, I am hungry for those real stories, stories of witness.

In response to these questions I get I’ll give a few bullet-y thoughts, and then I’ll come back not just to the why, but the how.

·       We have all as a nation been asked to survive a lot these past four years. Writing is survivorship. Maybe, yes, you are chronicling a suffering. But on the page, you stand free enough to tell the story.

·       I used to imagine that when I wrote about psychosis, drugs, dropping out of high school, I put on the page a stick figure who was just that thing. In my head the stick figure had a little sign: Psychosis Girl. I thought that labeled and compressed self was all readers would see, but that is not the case. You are a living, breathing, complicated multidimensional human on the page. Take that in. In giving that scary thing you are only showing us one piece of your completeness.

·       Flippantly I might say that if people don’t want readers to know they behaved badly they shouldn’t have behaved badly. I can’t say my experiences with this disclosure issue were easy. People were pissed. They didn’t want to talk to me for a while. But they got over it and if I had it to do over again, I’d be more honest, not less.

The final thought I share when I talk to these writers is that there are drafting questions and there are publishing questions. Drafting questions are, how can I make this the best work it can be? How can I reach down into that muck, if muck there is, and be staggeringly honest and see how that creates a story, whether fiction or nonfiction or poetry--that muck operates in all genres. And how it illuminates some piece of the world only I can illuminate.

So you draft like hell, and you draft fearlessly as hell, and you go back to it, and you make it as perfect and real and human as you can. And only then do you put your feet up and consider those publishing questions: not so much are those other people out there ready but am I ready. Are there ways I would feel comfortable moving forward, if I’m not all damn-the-torpedoes? Would pseudonyms help? Am I ready for this to appear in this kind of journal but not that one? And proceed accordingly, with good people in your life to support you and give you courage. Even if that good supportive and courageous person is you.

Notebook to Novel

OK, other people, I think you exist out there in the toxic-fog-soup of the wildfire superplume, laying over us here in Bellingham. Hello. My throat and my lungs have hurt for the past two days. It’s an I-can-only-guess landscape. If I look to the east I know our striking and snow-capped Mt. Baker is out there somewhere. Up in the gray wash is a spot of weak glow I can guess is the sun. But I couldn’t swear to these by the evidence of my eyes.

It’s a fictional kind of landscape. Fiction’s out there and in here--I could call this post Notebook to Novel. I just published my first full-length work of fiction (I’ve published stories and a novella), the novel Entangled Objects: A Novel in Quantum Parts. I know, it’s listed on my website as forthcoming. But it came. It’s just that problem of finding time to keep the website in order. Anyway!

The genesis of my novel has given me some thoughts for fiction writers trying to get started, as my writing at first didn’t feel like a novel. It began on a plane and my process was very natural and also very borrowable. (Maybe From Aviation to Novel? Not very catchy.)

Entangled began as I was flying home from Korea and several things had, er, entangled themselves in my head, in that weird twilight consciousness you get into in a plane. One was the memory of a cloning scandal—faked data claiming success in cloning human cells, a scandal that had happened in Korea.

I knew at least one U.S. scientist was involved and it made me wonder about the story of this person’s significant other—traveling to another country to give their S.O time to do this work, realizing the spouse was trying to create the cells of actual people. Which is existentially weird, especially if you follow the thought of scientists like Giulio Tononi, who’d argue each cell has a little bit of consciousness. So it’s weirdness for her (I imagined a her, someone in a marriage fairly traditional in some ways) that her guy could, and did clone the cells of actual humans, then shame that he didn’t. She became Fan, my first point-of-view character.

My second character came from similar musing. I had seen a man, goofing around, fall out of an elevator, barely missing a bad encounter with a woman’s toe. I began wondering what it would be like if he’d smashed it. Somehow that became imagining her becoming obsessed with televangelists while coming to terms with her own sexuality. Go figure.

As I kept writing I started on to Obsession 3, a pre-existing obsession of mine. This was what a reality star like Kim Kardashian must think about at the end of the day, with all of the glamming, cosmetic procedures, re-shaping of face and body. That this is all unreal? More real than real? Is creating yourself in this way very shallow or is it possibly very smart, at least, authentic to the person you wish you were?

My point is, because I was stuck on a twelve-hour flight and can’t sleep on planes, I didn’t just wonder idly about things. I started writing about those imaginings. It was cool.

So my suggestion for this post is to keep a notebook but go beyond describing what’s around you, and noting thoughts, though these are great. Go for the questions that the world around you is handing you. Don’t drop a single question that occurs to you, even if it’s one of those what-kind-of-parent-would-put-their-kid-in-that-awful-shirt kinds of things. Some parent did. Who?

What if the person you saw with the rowdy huge dog had the dog slip the leash and run away? Slip the leash and jump all over one of the president’s Secret Service men? (Actually happened to me with my dog Burley and George H.W. Bush’s security detail. Who had very little sense of humor about it.) What if this person got put on a domestic terrorist watchlist? (Did not happen to me, though I do get patted down in airports to a remarkable degree. Hmmm.)

Create a scenario for all those quirky situations that you see and put someone in those situations. Watch what happens around you and generate what-ifs. Make those people more and more real: what if the person who lost their dog then slept outside for days in an old sleeping bag in case the dog returned. What if it were the sleeping bag of a lost lover? You get the idea.

Generate a dozen or so scenarios/people in them each week and then write from the two who most capture your fancy. If you have trouble getting your characters all the way into their skins, think of someone you know and change everything about them. It is strangely easier to do this than create someone out of the air. You will not end up with the person you started with, trust me.

Calls for submission: Global Poemic is curating poems dealing with the pandemic. https://globalpoemic.wordpress.com/2020/09/09/i-like-your-mask/?fbclid=IwAR2Fm2J1UETyYyTFrcNotm4Fj6AXznIxAEQIH_lo8vB4JfGj9Ww5wzoZWKA

And my own Bellingham Review! We accept fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid work. Check us out at bhreview.org, where you’ll find the call for submissions.