"...Or you'll end up in my novel"

"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better."
--Anne Lamott

The first time I came across the ethical question of blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction was as a teen. A slightly paranoid friend in high school told me that her ex-boyfriend based a character in his play off of her and that she thought it was morally reprehensible. More recently, while reading the manuscript of a friend, I came to the realization that one of her characters was based off me. An odd sensation to read a fictionalization of yourself, but she was just a side character with my physical traits who would occasionally slip in literary words of wisdom to the narrator (in fact, the worst thing I might say is that I read a bit dull as a character).
In my own writing, however, after leaving behind the sadly autobiographical stories I wrote in childhood, I've tried to avoid basing characters directly off people in my own life. Working on some of my more recent projects however, I've discovered that it's inevitable. As writers, our minds are our landscapes. Everything we've read, seen, or experiences is what we funnel into our stories. Most importantly, the people we meet shape us.
I doubt there is any writer who can honestly say that nothing they've written has some basis in an experience they had or a person they've known. I think we often end up playing the "what if?" game. You start with an amusing or interesting situation from life and invent from there. Say, a late night volleyball game on the beach with your friends. Now you say "what if a treasure map had washed up on the shore that night?" or possibly, "what if Gary and I hated each other more and took out our animosities during the game?" There must be a story in that. The game in real life might have been tame, but throwing in those other variables makes it plot.
Some characters will become a composite of people I know. They might have one person's occupation, another's penchant for compulsive cleaning, but I develop completely fictional relationships for them within the story. Sometimes, if a close friend is being used as any sort of basis, I'll clear it with them first. I'll let them know that I'm lifting a bit of their physicality, or a circumstance from their life and using it in my story. So far no one has objected.
In most cases, I doubt someone reading my novel would pick out what they had been the inspiration for. I do have ethical qualms about making a direct transcript of a real person from my life to a character. But I can't pretend that my stories don't have the occasional non fiction basis. As a writer, I feel I have a sort of duty to capture the reality of human experience. Fiction is real in that sense, it can be a recognizable truth about life from a story that didn't happen, at least not exactly. It didn't happen, but it's still true.
Even more problematic can be injecting a "me" character into stories. It can be so easy to slip into writing about a hero that is basically your own self, especially when writing in the first person. I think a little bit of yourself will always be present in your characters. After all, what they say and do are filtered through you. But, sometimes it's really liberating to write from the perspective of someone totally different. A different background, different stance on issues, different race or gender, different age: I think experimenting with that can help you get outside yourself as a writer. And that can be so good for the work.

Bill Bryson: The Mother Tongue

The Mother Tongue: English and How it got that Way is a delightful book. Anyone interested in language, etymology, or history will love this book. Anyone vaguely curious about why English can seems so strange or confusing will find it enlightening and amusing.
Bryson works his way through some of the basics of the history of the language: how a bastardized peasant tongue somehow became one of the dominant languages of the world. Some of the sketchier bits of history like "the great vowel shift" are skirted over with good reason: there is no definitive understanding of that strange happening to this day. Dialects, American and British are discussed, as well as how the names of places and people came to be, and also the origins of swear words.
What always rings clear in this book is the fact that language is not a permanent thing. English is strangely malleable, constantly shifting, picking up bits of other languages, and changing. Where some languages have change very little in the past thousand years (so much so, you could read ancient manuscripts with little difficulty), old English is nearly unrecognizable to modern readers. Though Bryson admits English has its failings and that other languages are more expressive or sensible in certain areas, his love of the language is seen on every page. He reminds native speakers that the language they speak is beautiful, expressive, and unique among world languages.
Perhaps he is a little biased in his love of English, and doesn't go into all the textbook definitions. It's not a textbook, and it never feels like one. Overall, it's a book that is both fun to read and will teach you dozens of new things about the English language. Something about Bryson's voice is engaging and personable. You feel like you're chatting with an incredibly smart friend while having a drink together on a lazy Friday night. I'm currently in a Linguistics class at the moment, and I must say, that though The Mother Tongue seems light on the science, it was a fantastic book to read before the class. Nearly all of the topics on our syllabus were touched on by Bryson. I feel much more prepared than going into the class cold.

A Moveable Feast

Sorry it's taken me so long to get around to writing about this piece. I checked it out of the local library last month and read a few chapters each week in the Laundromat.
A Moveable Feast is Ernest Hemingway's chronicle of his life as a young writer in Paris. He meandered between cafes and friends' homes, staying in bare bones accommodations with his wife Hadley. Many other writers of the time figure into his account, Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. Each person sketched in detail sometimes brutal detail. Fitzgerald especially comes off as a bit of a naive fool, best illustrated in this infamous passage.
I love many of Hemingway's short stories, but his novels tend to be a little hard for me to connect to and read all the way through. However, I loved this memoir. Its stark prose was littered with surprising moments of poetry. This is one of my favorite passages from early in the book:

"All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationary and newspaper shops, the midwife— second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.”

Of course, reading about Hemingway's struggles as a young writer is reassuring to this young writer. All his desire to write "one true sentence," to publish, to be a good writer are something I can connect to in my own journey. Even when set backs (like losing a suitcase full of stories there were no other copies of) didn't deter him from his quest. It makes me want to go back to my "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" and reread all of his early works that are alluded to in the memoir.
So definitely give this one a read, even if you don't always enjoy Hemingway, this is not to be missed

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard

At the recommendation of my advisor, I checked this book out of the library. Annie Dillard is a well-known nature writer who won the Pulitzer Prize at 27. This memoir is about her childhood growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.

Dillard explores her young life from about the age of five to her early teens. The oldest of three girls, and the child of two eccentric parents, she traces her changing interests and growing consciousness in these formative years. From her description of the mysterious creature floating across her walls at night (the light from passing cars she would later realize), to her obsession with the microscope she received for Christmas one year, to discovering boys, religion, people, Dillard's story of her childhood is rich with detail.
Not all the chapters are perfectly chronological, but are more arranged by subject. In spite of the many decades between my own childhood and Dillard's I found it easy to connect to her process of discovery and growing up. She has a knack for zeroing in on those significantly insignificant moments that shape thinking and perspective in a child's life.
Beyond the easy, metaphor-rich writing style, the book is also full of humor. Dillard's mother had a tendency toward practical jokes and Dillard's description of her odd habits and use of her children as straight-men will likely gain at least a smile from readers. Other incidents also stand out: Dillard describes throwing snowballs at passing cars with the neighborhood boys in winter. On one occasion a man stopped his car, got out, and chased Dillard and a friend. The anecdotes all blend seamlessly into one narrative about the process of growing up.
All in all, it's an excellent memoir. Great for a lazy afternoon. Dillard's style is accesible, but not dumbed down. I will certainly be reading more of her work in the future.

Short Stories

I don't think I'm entering the Jane Austen Made Me Do It contest. I'm just not feeling it- the story doesn't feel alive to me and if it doesn't to me, it won't to the readers. Maybe next year.
However, I am entering a story I wrote over the summer to the college lit. mag. I like it, but I am always self conscious about other people reading and judging my writing. In my non-fiction class we're reading On Writing Well by William Zinsser and he says that you have to write for yourself. Eventually, if you want to do this for a living, other people have to get involved and it's not just for you any more, though. For my non-fiction class we're writing short memoirs this week, which is fun, but also challenging. Sometimes while I'm writing, I find I'm writing about other people, not myself.
Sometimes I think it's easier to write fiction, inventing a truth within the world of your story can be easier that expressing a truth from your own world.
I'm still working on rewriting my novel. Some days, after I've finished a book that was incredible; interesting, well constructed, with good characters, I feel like I am so presumptuous to think my book could compete. Yet, I love my characters too much to keep them to myself.
I've been practicing building suspense by writing some shorter stories with my characters solving puzzling mysteries in under 5000 words. I think I'll end up piecing these shorter mysteries together to create a book told from the sidekick's perspective that covers her first year working with the detective. We'll see.