Is there any place for the truth in writing?

As said by Robert McKee: "story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality." For many writers the act of writing is a cathartic one: it is an attempt for the writer to decipher some truth about themselves and their feelings. A writer weaves a tapestry of starlight, depicting battles with dragons and ogres rather than life's own dark demons. But the needle used is thick with rust from our realities, and it leaves behind stains. What we chose to write reflects our own preferences not only for style, genre and language but certain agendas, thoughts, feelings and experiences. Whilst a work of fiction need not be necessarily about ourselves, there will always be an echo of the writers within their own work. 

But this does not mean to say that everything we write is a mirror image of ourselves; Emily Dickinson herself says: "when I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse - it does not mean - me - but a supposed person." We may choose to write as an 'I' but this does not mean that we are necessarily talking with our own voice. What we write may be more so a reflection of ourselves in a murky puddle; similar but not exact. We draw on elements of our own lives and transform them into fiction.

The truth may arguably have no place in writing, but I feel it is impossible to differentiate it. For many writers are told to "write what they know" and what do we know better than ourselves?

Comments

  1. Unknown27 January 2014 at 10:53

    Am I right in thinking that you (or Emily Dickinson) are proposing that "when I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse - it does not mean - me - but a supposed person." that this supposed person is what the writer endeavors to act like in reality?

    In an almost uncanny way, this would pertain to an ideal for which one should strive towards - something that hadn't really crossed my mind before now. I knew that some writers write for themselves, I just guess it wasn't made clear to me until now that they do so as a way of potential self-improvement. So cheers for that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Unknown27 January 2014 at 12:50

      Unfortunately, I cannot speak for Emily Dickinson herself, but Helen McNeil seems to interpret this line as "Dickinson [seeking] to avoid the author-reader intimacy of Romanticism, and asks for an almost modernist distancing from her speaker."
      I feel that Dickinson had attempted to put up a barrier between the 'I' in her poetry and the 'I' of her life, which is important as what we write is not a direct reflection of ourselves but rather, I feel, some distorted reflection - like a trick mirror. I feel there will always be an element of the writer in their writing. But the world of fiction is an ideal, most of the time, isn't it? Characters don't bumble along in their dialogue, they don't get tongue tied or lose their point, so I suppose, yes, in some ways what we write may well be an ideal we are striving towards. How many of us would prefer to live in a fictional world than the real one? We'd still be the same person, but somehow better. So perhaps as writers, we write parts of ourselves into our work, but an improved, more polished version of ourselves so we can see this improvement and, yes, perhaps strive towards it.

      Delete
  2. Lorna Rebecca27 January 2014 at 19:57

    The idea that we write a sort of distorted reflection of ourselves is really interesting to me; it's strange to think through the characters in some of my favourite novels and think that somewhere within each of those characters could be traits from deep within the writer. Even more, it's amazing to think that through writing characters we might be uncovering things about ourselves that we aren't even conscious of as being traits that we might possess.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheever’s narratives rarely end ‘happily ever after’. Why might a writer choose to make their characters suffer?

' The Swimmer ', Neddy returns home to find his family gone and house empty; ' Torch song ', Jack is left on the brink of death; ' Reunion ', an estranged father and son are left no closer towards reconciliation: Cheever does not write uplifting stories; he writes stories which are truthful. Life isn't easy; we go through hardships and don't always come out on top, this is a theme which prevails throughout Cheever's stories. He himself said: “I write to make sense of my life." With the numerous times that Cheever alludes to alcohol and relationships, we don't have to dig too deeply to begin to suspect of the author's inner turmoil with alcoholism and questions of sexuality. His work is a means of making sense of and wrestling with this inner strife. But this is not a phenomena present solely in the work of John Cheever, authors notoriously have "a sliver of ice in their hearts", as said by Graham Greene. Authors do...
Read more

Why are Cheever’s stories ‘uniquely American’? What would make a story uniquely British?

Quite recently a friend of mine noted that Ori (one of the dwarves from Peter Jackson's The Hobbit)  is the "best representation of true British folk." It's a statement, I think, has a great deal of sense to it. But what is it that makes him so quintessentially British? He isn't one of the warrior dwarves (although in Jackson's interpretation we see that he  can  fight). He is awkward, bumbling, soft-spoken, and hardly memorable. But ultimately Ori proves himself courageous and determined. He is, quite literally, a little man who stands up against a dragon and wins. Moreover, I find it interesting to note that Ori is a writer, accompanying the other dwarves to the Lonely Mountain as their scribe. So what can this mean for British writers? If American writers are coarse and blunt and include allusions to the American dream and capitalism, it would seem apt that British writers are more softly spoken, melancholic and sarcastic in their work. Perhaps this...
Read more

‘No writer emerges from childhood into a pristine environment, free from other people’s biases about writers.’

Writer. It seems to be something of a dirty word. Were I to go into a room full of Creative Writing students and ask them how many were writers, I wonder how few tentative hands I would see raised. Instead we hedge ourselves, saying we want to be authors, journalists or screenwriters: practical jobs that we can assign a label and a pay-cheque to. We all love writing, but we're ashamed of being writers. In my opinion, as soon as children enter primary school their creativity is culled. These small children are already deciding what they want to be in life: firefighters, police officers, teachers, vets or nurses; all practical and sensible occupations. To say they wanted to grow up to be a writer would be like them saying they wanted to grow into a penguin. A ridiculous notion! Anyone can write; everyone has a book in them : these are the things we're told from the beginning, and as with Rose in Who Do You Think You Are? when we try to be a writer, we're told that...
Read more