27. Blogging: Where the Truth Lies

Two of my last three blogs ("Jesus v Lenin..." and "Rachel's Massage") contained reconstructions of conversations part real, part imagined, so I wanted to write something about the blurred line between fiction and non-fiction, and about public and private self-invention and self-disclosure. These are matters at the core of everything we encounter and contribute online.

To set me going I have taken the luxury of a random dip into The Book of Disquietude by Ferdinand Pessoa (see blog 3, "Inspiration and Sources"). Here are some excerpts from the writing of this pre-blogging blogger with the multiple dramatis personae in his 'theatre of himself (entry 405 in my edited text):

Do we really feel what we think we're feeling? Does this conversation, for example, have any semblance of reality? None that I can see. It would be prohibited in a novel. And with good reason...  I mean, I'm not absolutely certain that I'm talking with you.

Every good conversation should be a monologue by two... We ultimately should not be able to ascertain whether we've really conversed with someone or if we've completely imagined the conversation... The best and most intimate conversations... are those that novelists have between two characters in their novels.

I slam doors within me where certain sensations were going to pass in order to be realized.

I suppose neophyte writers are like NZ Idol aspirants, each convinced a star is awaiting discovery. We scribble in the privacy of our studies, sing our songs in the bath or shower, and dream of our fifteen seconds of fame and fortune. Our family and friends, wisely hiding their true feelings, may grunt encouraging noises about the little we reveal to them of our efforts, but by and large we prefer not to put our fantasies to the test. Our stories, along with much of our lives, lie unheralded in bottom drawers. We are fearful of the consequences of daylight for our sense of who we are.

When, about ten years ago now, I finally made a concerted effort to write creatively, I found myself outside my comfort zone, personally and professionally. Personally, in that I have never been one given to public displays of emotion. Professionally, in that my published work has been exclusively non-fiction, the psychology of which I find different to creative writing. In the academic kind of non-fiction writing that I have been involved with in my professional life, there are certain rules and formalities that provide a divide between the ‘self’ and the ‘self-in-print’. In creative writing, it seems to me, there are no such protections and there is a stronger identification between the ‘self’ and the ‘self-in-print’.

The most difficult transition has been to come to terms with the freedom of creative writing. It takes me time to realise that I can simply make things up. Anything at all, without constraint. Pure invention. That I live in an exploding universe of multiple realities, some grounded in time and place, others hyper or virtual. Like Reality Nirvana Tuttle in Lee Tulloch’s Fanciful Nobodies, I can try out a new costume every day:

I can be vamp, tramp, flapper, sleaze, mod, postmod, Pop Art, disco, retro, rococo, go-go, gypsy, new wave, new romantic, New Look, Carnaby Street, Cossack, Bonnie and Clyde, directoire, debutante, existentialist, belle époque, buffalo girl, baby doll, Barbarella, punk, postpunk, Pre-Raphaelite, even preppy if I want to, which is almost never.

I can be any one of these things, and I never know which one I’m going to be when I wake up in the morning. It’s exciting.

I don’t need to read a pool of research studies, carefully referenced, to justify my conclusions or an extensive bibliography to demonstrate my erudition. My first tentative storyline, ‘Space Truckies’, was never developed further, but it gave me an inkling of the imaginative freedom of science fiction writing. Cameron Gunn, my first tentative character, was a cardboard cut-out figure modelled on a contestant in the Survivor Island TV series, but he was not me nor was he anyone I knew. He was a fictitious person sketched in contrast to myself. (Are all my ‘characters’ alter egos, all my protean authorial personae masks to reveal myself?)

These two firsts were watersheds for me in the creative writing programme I was attending. They endorsed the workshop’s permission to fictionalise. Anything. From fact, from fancy. I realised I can fictionalise myself and my life in multiple guises, that a truthful fiction writer is a chimera.

There is a new self-consciousness in this realisation, a self-consciousness that underscores my sense of the continuity, for the fiction author, of the ‘self’ and the ‘self-in-print’. Perhaps there is nothing I can write, no matter how fanciful, that does not ease open a window on myself, a window that as a non-fiction author I can keep tightly shut. Even in my oppositional creations, of characters or story lines, or of my father in a poem I wrote about him (‘The Tennis Racquet’), I am partially disclosed, undressed, laid bare. I found myself, like Dave Eggers in his wonderful twenty pages of acknowledgements to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), reluctant to tell people what I was writing about… “The author said Oh, well, that he was kind of working on a book, kind of mumble mumble… it’s kind of hard to explain, I guess it’s kind of a memoir-y thing.’ I enjoy Eggers’ advice ‘PRETEND IT’S FICTION’, and laugh appreciatively at two of the themes of his book - ‘The Painfully, Endlessly Self-Conscious Book Aspect’ and ‘The Memoir as Act of Self-Destruction Aspect.’ And I invent my own ambiguous account of my work. “It’s sort of ninety per cent true,” I say, “and one hundred per cent fiction.”

William Boyd’s Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart (2002) is a convincing display of fiction masquerading as autobiography. Logan Mountstuart is a fictional character caught up in real historic events. That’s the joy of story telling. Everything is as it seems or nothing is as it seems. The self portraiture and disclosures of pieces in my blogs could be my fictional creation of a character modelled on my father, my uncle, a friend, anyman, everyman, or plucked from a randomly accessed internet biography. Those who know me may have some inkling of where the truth lies. Those who don’t will have to grapple with the alternative view that ‘truth lies’, that the voice that seems most authentically truthful may merely (though, as a would-be writer, there is really no ‘merely’ about it) be the voice that is most giftedly crafted. Language is seductive and creative writing is one endless tease, a kind of hide-and-seek of the mind.

There is another aspect too to creating confusion about the truthfulness of one's blogs - concern with the feelings and sensibilities of family and friends. Things may be said behind the masks of fictional personae that are not easily said directly to people one loves and cares about. For me this becomes particularly problematic in my attitudes to religion and to homeopathy, both of which live strongly in my family environment. There are things in my writing that I would not have cared for my parents to read (and probably not my children either) and I am cautious about drawing on some of this material for my blog. Against that cautiousness I have to recognise two things: one, that some of my best writing is the stuff that is closest to the emotional bone of my life, and two, that the more self-disclosing and intimate pieces that I have shared are often greatly valued by others who can relate to similar events and feelings in their own lives.

Lionel Shriver, in reviewing reactions to one of her novels (see link), considers that 'anyone considering writing fiction or a memoir that brushes even slightly against real-life family should take heed: think twice.'  Her 2007 novel A Perfectly Good Family caused a huge and unanticipated rift in her family. Her mother and Presbyterian Minister father were 'incandescent' and her younger brother stopped speaking to her for two years. It made her aware of the defencelessness of those who are written about in fiction, however carefully disguised. 'Text', she writes, 'trumps truth'. Nevertheless, she concluded, even knowing the consequences, she would write and publish the book again: 'That may make me a real writer. It doesn't make me a nice person.'

Now me, well I never particularly wanted to be the nice person. But reading Shriver's experience makes me unsure whether I want to be the real writer either.