Pausing at the Border of Fiction

Sometimes I read a passage that gives such perfect voice to what I’ve been feeling that I have one of those disembodied jolts—as if the words on the page are more me than words I’ve actually written.

That was how I felt when I read this passage in the New York Times on the subject of “autofiction,” the fuzzy edge between fiction and autobiography.

Part of this mystery is due to the chaotic consciousness native to the novel-writing process, which requires a degree of possession … To dig a book out of the ground can be backbreaking, hand-tearing work; you need to forget what you are doing, to fall into a trance, and when the spell breaks, you can’t be entirely sure what you’ve unearthed, where it came from or who will recognize it as belonging to them, too. And however much of what results is pure invention (or so you think), your subjectivity is all you have. You made it up. It’s made of you.

This passage resonated with me in a profound and complicated way. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say: in several ways.

The first resonance was with the description of being in a spell, “possessed,” while writing a new book. That was not especially true for my recently-published novel, which underwent a series of transformations over several years until it became the book it needed to be. Between each transformation, I did and wrote other things, including an entire other novel that I ended up publishing first.

It was true, however, for my new manuscript, my work-in-progress. This one needed space, rather than time—the immersive space of the alternate reality I inhabited when I wrote it.

I wrote the manuscript during eight months of pandemic lockdown, when I had nowhere to go except inside—although the grammatical formulation “I wrote” isn’t really accurate, since it implies a kind of intentional doing, rather than the sense of embodied accompaniment that I actually experienced. To put it another way: I didn’t feel like a doer who was creating an object called a manuscript. It was more like letting my Barbara-life fade into background so the story could step into the foreground and show me how to tell it.

I can still feel the enchantment of those eight months, the realer-than-real sense of being immersed in another world that I was both inventing and inhabiting—living vicariously, perhaps, through a story that was more intense and interesting than the restricted little world of my quarantined self, yet with a writerly rigor, as I listened for what needed to come next and tried to put it on paper as cleanly as I could.

It would be wrong to reduce the experience to a kind of escapism—an avoidance of my quarantined reality—because it was also an experience of profound risk as I went to places, through my protagonist, where I’d never dared to go. With the cessation of my usual activities during this pandemic year—the slowness and silence, so different from my usual frenetic life—I had the interior spaciousness to do that.

In this enchantment, I didn’t worry about story beats or hero’s journeys or any of the this-is-what-publishers-are-looking-for elements. I just wanted to do right by my characters.

And here’s the second thing, the other way the passage resonated with me.

Jessica Winter, author of the article, notes that it’s hard to say “whether or how much a book draws from real life.” If it’s not memoir, then something about the book was invented, but not everything. Parts of the novel—maybe the important parts—are you, the author, right there for everyone to see. Sometimes they’re snippets of things that really happened, a setting or a bit of dialogue that you import from your own experience because it fits so perfectly. Sometimes they’re deep emotions and insights that you re-embody in a fictitious character, in response to a fictitious event—emotionally true, but not literally true. Sometimes they’re things you wish you could have known and felt and done.

All of these can work. What doesn’t work so well, in my experience, is trying to use fiction for personal catharsis. That happened in my first (terrible) attempt at a novel. I was unleashing the rage and humiliation that I hadn’t worked through in real life, using my characters the way children use puppets to act out the emotions they’re not ready or able to articulate.

Nor does it work to use—or attempt to use—a real-life incident as a short-cut, an easy and convenient scene to plug into a novel in order to fill a plot point or illuminate a character. I caught myself trying to do that in the first (also terrible) draft of my WIP. I wanted to show the protagonist in a moment of nearly-disastrous carelessness, goading her son into being more of a daredevil than he really was, because that was the kind of son she wished she had—and the kind of person she wished she was. I had the perfect memory from my own life. I didn’t have to create a scene, all I had to do was exaggerate a bit, change a few details.

Needless to say, that scene didn’t really fit the story. It had to go. Instead, I had to do the hard work of writing a brand-new scene that did fit.

The more I ponder this question of the border between fiction and life, the fuzzier and messier it seems.

On the one hand, there needs to be a certain interior distance in order to write fiction that isn’t just thinly-disguised personal catharsis; without that, you can’t see what’s actually on the page. On the other hand, you have to close that gap again, re-enter that scary emotional place, in order to live it anew while you write. What comes out when you do that can be surprising. It might not look like anything you’ve actually experienced, but it’s still you.

I never posed nude as my protagonist did in Queen of the Owls, yet I could write those scenes because I took the essence of the feeling of exposure I had experienced and gave it to Elizabeth, my protagonist. I never faced a birth father who rejected me, as Susannah did in The Sound Between the Notes, yet Susannah is the “me” who knows how rejection feels.

My new manuscript, which isn’t (yet) a book that someone can hold in her hand and read, was like that too—but it was also different.

In my prior novels, I channeled the struggles and emotions and insights that I knew, from my own experience, and re-incarnated them into works of fiction. This time, my character’s journey taught me something new. Instead of being my avatar, she was my teacher.

I’d wanted to write a book about someone who opened to passion and then, though she hadn’t set that as her goal, to an experience of unconditional love. When I began writing the book, I can’t claim to have understood, for myself, what I wanted my character to come to understand. In other words, I wasn’t writing from what I knew, not yet, not until I had accompanied her on her journey.

In pondering the elusive border between fiction and autobiography, I’ve come to believe that the border is not only pliable but porous, allowing a flow in both directions. Why not?  If our lives can inform the fiction we write, why can’t the fiction we write inform our lives? Why can’t we become better people by creating characters who have something to teach us?

I don’t know if this experience would have been possible if I’d written the manuscript while living my regular, pre-pandemic life. Maybe it was the isolation and concentration that made the receptivity possible, or maybe it was just something I was ready for, at this point in my life. I don’t especially care.

What seems more interesting, right now, is the question I’m left with: Did the story happen to me, as well as to my character?

Jessica Winter offers a response, though it might not be an answer, as she concludes her article: “But look: I wrote it down. You just read it. So it must be true, it must have really happened — right?”

Over to you, dear WU friends…Does any of this ring a bell for you? How have you toggled or transcended the border before fiction and life?

[coffee]