The Dark Side
By Juliet Marillier | March 4, 2010 |
One of the most often asked and most annoying questions for writers is ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ My answer depends on the circumstances. If the questioner is, say, a talented twelve-year-old, I explain how everyday experiences can provide fodder for the writer’s imagination, and how the more widely a person reads, the bigger the worlds that open up within his or her mind. But if the question comes from an ill-informed adult, the kind who tells me she may write a book some day when she has the time, I simply reply that I get my ideas from real life. If the person is puzzled as to the relevance of my real life to, say, a magical version of medieval Ireland, so be it. If I told this person that human behaviour transcends boundaries of time, space and culture, and that the biggest themes are universal, I’d probably get the response, ‘Yeah, right.’
I’ve had some professional self-doubt recently, partly thanks to reading a Review From Hell. This reminded me that a WU contributor, in response to a post from me last year, suggested I should consider writing a memoir about my cancer experience. I remember my sharp mental recoil when this entirely reasonable idea was put forward. I know real life provides the raw material for a writer’s creativity. I understand that such an account might be helpful to other women. And in fact I made notes while I was sick, especially in the earlier part of the year when I hadn’t been knocked flat by the treatment. I was able to blog about it; I had made my diagnosis public fairly quickly, so there were no secrets. But when I thought about a book-length work based directly on my personal experience I encountered a mental barrier. It was big, solid, and hung with KEEP OUT notices.
I have many such walls. Behind them are times when I’ve been less than proud of myself, times when I’ve failed to stand up for myself or for others; times when I’ve been hurt, ridiculed or put down (that review is rearing its ugly head again.) Those times can be painfully hard to bring into the light, even deconstructed and spread around in works of fiction. Most of that stuff I don’t even share with my friends, let alone with a broad readership. I have been wondering if that makes me less honest than I should be as a writer. After all, the more real the emotion behind the telling – anger, guilt, passion, frustration, envy, grief – the more powerful (and the more emotionally true) the story that arises from it.
I admire those who can grapple with the catastrophes of their real lives and transform them into works that enlighten us, whether in the form of short story, novel, memoir or autobiography. To do so is to move towards dealing with unresolved grief or anger, and perhaps to help some readers do the same. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is one example, and I’m sure you have plenty more.
Looking back over my novels, I can see that the dark stuff does creep through those walls. I was intrigued when several interviewers picked up on this in Heart’s Blood, asking me to what extent Caitrin’s personal journey was based on my own experience. Factually most of it wasn’t; emotionally much of it was. I was happy with the question, because it meant Caitrin came across as a real person rather than as a character. If my writing expresses emotional truths, that satisfies me, and I know from my readers that my fiction has often succeeded in illuminating other people’s dark places. But writing my real life story? I don’t think so.
How close to the bone is your writing? Would you be prepared to lay your past bare in the interests of emotional honesty / a great story? Or is there a line you would not cross?
Photo credit © Michel Mota Da Cruz | Dreamstime.com
Juliet Marillier has written twenty-four novels for adults and young adults and two collections of short fiction. Her works of historical fantasy have been published around the world and have won numerous awards. Juliet’s most recent series was Warrior Bards, of which the third and final book, A Song of Flight, was published in 2021. Her collection of reimagined fairy tales, Mother Thorn and Other Tales of Courage and Kindness, had its trade release in 2022. Mother Thorn is illustrated by Kathleen Jennings and published by Serenity Press.
Juliet is currently working on a two-book fantasy series. The first book in this duology, The Amber Owl, will be published by New Dawn in February 2025.
When not writing, Juliet looks after a small crew of rescue dogs.
In a creative nonfiction class, I was warned about writing memoir that was too soon, or too emotional and difficult to grapple with.
I chose to ignore that warning, and write about my history as a male who is asexual.
While I found it extremely hard to write, because I was having a relationship problem concerned with this at the moment, the struggle to address what my entire being recoiled from thinking about helped me to produce some interesting techniques. Namely, indirect narratives.
And though I’ve never cried so much while writing, and never had so little hair on my head by the end of the process, I produced what my instructor called “a real publishable piece”.
And I came out of it a stronger nonfiction writer.
_____
I can be completely honest about myself on the page and comfortably share it with the world. No blushes.
But finding out exactly what IS the truth…that’s a lot harder.
_____
The line I won’t cross is exposing other people in my writing. I would never embarrass a family member or really ruin someone in my writing, no matter how true it was. I would never out my son for his gambling problems, or drug abuse, or any of those stories I see published from time to time.
At this point it’s hard to answer that question because my life has not been particularly horrible. Given I’m a positive person so a lot of that may just be perspective.
The hardest thing that ever happened in my life I actually spoke about to a gym full of people. I was on a Tumbling Ministry team during college (I know that sounds very odd but it was wonderful) and the seniors always spoke at our final shows at our college. The audience was always huge, I’m talking couple thousands. My senior year my 15 year old cousin committed suicide. He had a myriad of family problems and was bipolar. One of the biggest newspapers in Kentucky ran a story about his suicide in an attempt to make him the poster child for the high homosexual suicide rate. As you can imagine trying to deal with my private pain, and I mourn very privately, while trying to deal with the story being in the newspaper, made for a very difficult first semester of my senior year.
All of that said. By April I felt I should speak about it. Not one of those “don’t commit suicide speeches” but more focused on how it had changed my whole perspective on life, emphasizing the preciousness of the moment. So I suppose it would depend on the situation and what I thought the ultimate outcome was and how it played into the healing process. Speaking about my cousins death, not carrying the secret pain around, helped me.
There’s a book I love that does a great job exposing and grappling with real-life catastrophes and transforming them into something enlightening: Manic, a memoir by Terry Cheney. It’s an intimate account of her struggle with bi-polar disorder, including a graphic rape scene, and how she ultimately turned around and parlayed her pain into…. writing. It became a NYT best seller.
An important mantra of mine writing has always been, “write where it hurts,” whether this means digging in and finding my own hardest emotions about a character I’ve created or that character’s most painful, often hidden, emotions; or creating stories whose situations somehow represent a thorn in my side. This, I find, adds tremendous depth and resonance to the page.
I let my past experiences color my fiction for sure, but I have yet to actually insert my real life into my stories (though I am planning on doing a little of that in my next novel). I don’t really think it’s possible to undergo a huge trauma and not have it affect everything you do. My mom passed away almost seven years ago, when I was a freshman in college, and the main theme of my novel now is death, and exploring everyone’s differing relationships with it – there is obviously a reason for it. But I love my story, and I don’t think I would have been able to write it this way without the dark experiences.
There is definitely a line I wouldn’t cross – some things I would never share. But for the most part, I try to let my life experiences (good AND bad) into my writing. I think it makes me a stronger writer, and gives me my voice.
.-= Heather´s last blog ..A community of my own =-.
My writing is always pretty close to what I’m feeling, but like Larry, I once took a creative nonfiction class and tried to write something that I was still too close to. That was a big mistake, and the only time I cried about writing criticism since I was like 12. My professor basically had to stop the discussion because she could see it was getting to be too much for me. (In fairness to me, people had taken it to a personal level instead of just focusing on the writing; in fairness to them, that probably meant the writing wasn’t strong enough.)
So. I still want to tackle that subject some day, but I’m still not sure I’m ready.
In the meantime, I tackle other things that are important to me too. I find it difficult to sustain a project if I’m not emotionally invested in it. Which is not to say that everything I write is about *me* or *my* emotions. Some of my best writing has been about the emotional journeys I see in the people closest to me. All highly fictionalized, of course, but the emotional truth is the core of the story, and what keeps me going both as a writer and as a reader.
I’m with you: it takes a lot of strength to truly bare yourself, especially if you label it non-fiction, and I admire that.
.-= Kristan´s last blog ..On laughing, and doing things backward =-.
I write fiction and for me it’s not a matter of choosing to include or exclude something from my own life. Things come up without my understanding what they are. When I recently finished a revision of a novel for my agent I found myself in tears. and I saw that yes, this was a fantasy about people and talking animals but also it was full of grief for my own mother, who had Alzheimer’s and died in 1998. The slow piece-at-a-time passing away from that disease made mourning and grief hard to come to; they came to me when I thought I was writing about something else.
I think we are all writing about more than we understand, and maybe memoir is a particular way of wrestling with that stuff and bringing it into consciousness.
Like you, I wouldn’t write about my real life story (as sensational as it might be!)
I do often use personal experiences as springboards for stories, but my writing can be emotionally honest without being factual.
It’s about using the thoughts and feelings you do know, to write about what you don’t know.
.-= Suzannah-Write It Sideways´s last blog ..“Write What You Know.” So, What Do You Know? =-.
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In a way, my fiction is much more revealing and honest than my nonfiction. Like you said, the emotions – pretty much every single emotion – are my own. The circumstances that bring about the emotions in my fiction are not true stories at all, but the feelings of doubt, despair, joy, anxiety, fear…those are all mine.
.-= Rebecca @ Diary of a Virgin Novelist´s last blog ..Letting creativity out of the cage =-.
This is one of the very reasons I write fiction. So I *can* cross the line, but without anyone really knowing I did.
.-= Lydia Sharp´s last blog ..52 Qualities of the Prosperous Writer: Number Nine, Saleable =-.
I write mostly poetry, so I usually try to cross the line and get into the emotions that I am going through at the present. I find it to be cathartic and refreshing. In the least, it’s a damn good way of getting things off your chest if you can’t speak of them to others. However, where I do draw a line is to bring in the actual details of events in my life. Like Lydia says, I like to be able bring in the emotions felt without most people realizing the context. I guess that’s the crux right there: content versus context.
.-= Matt´s last blog ..Working on work… =-.
i don’t know if i’m objective enough to ever write a memoir. But I have noticed that interviews and various people tend to ask the writer if this was ‘their story’ – and to be honest, I find it a really annoying question. What I like about writing fiction is that my characters can invent, pretend, have exciting adventures, respond to danger, take risks, be wild, be heroes or villains. I like that latitude and I don’t want to feel defensive while I write because I do think it could negatively affect the work. I like Salinger’s approach – silence no matter the question!
It’s entirely possible to channel the emotions associated with a personal experience–and even certain details of the experience itself–without dipping into raw autobiography.
Method actors do this every day.
As for whether this makes fiction “emotionally honest,” I think this depends less on the personal experiences of the writer (though they are helpful), and more on the writer’s skill at observation and association.
It’s possible to write insightful, illuminating fiction about something you’ve never experienced, if you’re capable of drawing parallels to more familiar things, and observing life clearly and without preconceptions.
Conversely, you may experience something firsthand, yet find yourself unable to write honestly about it–perhaps because you’re not being honest with yourself about the experience.
One isn’t better than the other. Sometimes an unreliable narrator reveals more about a subject than one who fearlessly confronts it, by showing us the very human qualities of self-deceit and idealism.
What magnificent, insightful responses! Larry raises a very good point – some life experiences can’t be written about because of their potential to expose and/or hurt people other than the writer. (Mind you, some authors still do this!)
These posts suggest to me that we all understand emotional truth and that there are ways and ways of setting one’s painful feelings on the page.
The first creative piece I had published was based on one of the most emotionally challenging times of my life. I couldn’t have written the piece immediately after the events happened. It took nearly ten year for me to process everything. But it was more cathartic having taken the time. Now that the thoughts and emotions are captured on paper, there’s no taking them back, and I’m strangely grateful for that. I don’t think I want them anymore.
I use my emotions and life experiences in my writing, but usually they’re transformed by the story. I wrote a short story about a woman who has a recurrence of breast cancer. When my sister read the story she called, fearing that this was my way of telling her that I was suffering a recurrence of breast cancer. (I’d beaten it once.) No. But I have imagined the situation. My way of dealing with it, I suppose.
People often ask me where I get my ideas, and usually assume they stem from something that has happened to me. But I’ve lived a quiet life–if I only wrote about things that actually happened to me, I would write some dreadfully boring books!
I’ve spent my entire life putting myself to sleep imagining alternate lives, living situations, etc. I’m not unhappy with my life–I just have a very good imagination!
In answer to the “Where do you get your ideas?” question, I’ve sometimes quoted whoever it was who said they answer with, “Where do you get yours?” But I’ve discovered that doesn’t work–they look at me as if they’ve never had an idea in their lives. And maybe they haven’t! I remember being surprised that others didn’t put themselves to sleep imagining their furnishings in someone else’s home, and I’d thought that was normal. What else would you think about then?
.-= Valerie´s last blog ..Kitchen Disasters =-.
I do put myself in my characters. I think most writers do. But I don’t know how much people would recognize me in there — maybe more than I think, I don’t know. :)
But as for the line, I write fiction, so it’s obviously different from memoirs, but if it worked for the story, I’d put myself in a book as much as necessary as long as it couldn’t hurt someone else, as long as it wasn’t so recognizable that it would put someone I know in a bad light.
.-= Samantha Clark´s last blog ..John Green says it’s ok to suck, and other links =-.
I have been on the other side of this – a woman in my writer’s group had begun a new book, and offered us the first two chapters to critique.
I told her I really liked it, and that it must be hard to write a character that is so obviously crazy. I said a few more intemperate things about the mentally ill (I thought) character, complimented her writing, then rested. As others commented, and she responded, it became clear that the character was based in large part on her experiences in her youth (before I knew her). She appeared to have taken my comments in stride, but I was mortified.