As Strange as Fiction
Early in the new Murakami novel, a young writer named Tengo edits/rewrites a novella, originally written by a teenage girl, to win a debut literary prize. As the novel progresses, the world he lives in changes to resemble the world Tengo embellished/ created in his work. Notably, he describes two moons in the novella, and lo and behold, eventually he notices there are two moons in his world, and the second moon looks exactly how he described it.
On occasion, I’m struck by the similarity of something in the real world to something in a story I wrote. Am I special person, like Tengo? (I’m aware Tengo is a fictional character) Or did my sub-conscious give me the idea, which I used in the story, and then noticed in the real world? I lean toward the latter.
I tried NaNoWriMo this year. I failed. I wrote about 1,500 words my first day, but decided they were so bad, and I mean really bad, that I couldn’t bear the thought of pounding out 48,500 more terrible words. (NaNoWriMo seems to work for some people and that’s great) I share this because in those first few pages, my main character hits a little girl with his car on his way to work. It’s not his fault. The girl darted out in front of him, but he feels guilty, and wonders if he could have prevented it had he been paying more attention.
Like many of my story ideas, I stole this one from real life. Maybe six or seven years ago, on my way to work, I saw a mother and her small child walking on the side of the road. I was stopped at a traffic light, and made a mental note to go well below the 35 mph speed limit until I’d passed them. Inexplicably, the girl ran into the street. Luckily I was still a good twenty yards away and hit the brakes. The mother grabbed her daughter, yelled at her, and I think mouthed an apology to me. My heart pounded the remaining five minutes of the drive to work. How easily my life could have changed if I’d been even a little distracted that day.
Like many things that are terrible in real life, but great for a short story or novel, the idea stuck with me, and I decided to try it. A few weeks after I wrote those 1,500 words, a little girl was hit and killed by a car in my hometown. And I feel guilty even mentioning this tragedy in a blog post. I know there is no connection between my writing a scene and a very similar scene happening in the real world, but it was still surreal and jarring to read the account in the local newspaper.
I recently attempted meta-fiction in a short story. The first few pages are ostensibly in third-person, though there are hints that suggest otherwise. About a thousand words in, one of the characters directly addresses the narrator. The story continues in first person, with the narrator occasionally commenting on how he will turn the conversation between the two characters and him into a short story. Then, in a previous draft, I shifted again, and revealed an autobiographical first person voice behind the narrator:
I wrote to explore Eryn and Harold, two fascinating people, two fascinating characters, and I inserted myself for triangulation, to put something more at stake, adding the element of self-aware story-telling.
I decided to do away with this second shift because it felt too blunt, too jarring. But I realized, in writing this fiction, that I’d ended up, at least partially, explaining why I write.
I took these great moments and added and changed and emphasized and cut and rewrote and made a story. I gave some of my lines to Harold. I pretended to see Eryn as perfect, despite being keenly aware of her flaws. I made a story because the reality failed to live up to expectations. The actual ending was even less satisfying, even more anti-climatic.
…much like the ending of this blog post.
I like this: “I made a story because the reality failed to live up to expectations.”
But I think I approach it the opposite way. I write fiction as a response to something better and more whole in the world as it actually is. So making the fiction is, in a way, an homage to the reality of a world that shocks with its wonder and its corruption.
I’ve also often had the experience of writing something, and then seeing what appears to be another version of it appear in reality. It’s always striking to me, but then it always feels like how fortune tellers can feel accurate–based on something big and broad and vague.