In my case, I made the decision early on that I was going to be very open about the book and claim upfront that each of the stories was based on my life experience. I think my reasoning goes back to what I was saying earlier, about wanting the book to be "more than a book," that I wanted the reader to feel a little unsettled about what they were reading: there's a core of factual truth here.
I dislike that premise implies that a fiction writer is incapable of dreaming up stories that can bring readers to tears, that if you are lucky enough to be living a pretty sedate life ,as I am, you've got nothing worthy of writing about, that you're incapable of making a reader's gut wrench.Frankly, that's what makes readers nervous, the sorcery of you or me or any good fiction writer making up characters who feel like real people, of telling a story that feels true but isn't.
Maybe that's the foundation of my book: how do we come to terms with the death of someone we love when it is impossible to come to terms with such a profound loss? The path I found where I could even ask that question, or maybe advance it beyond what I'd attempted in A Year and a Day, was by straddling the line: this is fiction and memoir, it is true and it isn't.
My only obligation as a fiction writer is to the story, to make it good, so good the busy reader doesn't feel that flipping those pages was a waste of time. And I still believe that.
As writers and readers, we're drawn to conflict. It's that ancient theory of plot that's written on the whiteboard during every fiction workshop, characters who want something overcoming obstacles as a way to create narrative momentum and suspense. So there's that, that trauma gives us more plot.
Writing is my way of trying to understand vast things that probably I'll never truly understand, a way of exploring a Big Question, of wrestling meaning from the chaos of life. Consequently, when I choose to write overtly or even secretly about my real life, it's always something difficult and complicated that I'm longing to make sense of.
Think about the stories you have inside that scare you. That's what you should be writing. I and others call that writing from the dark place. Our humiliations and secret fears and deepest anxieties, those times where we were at our worst: that's the best material.
