Question for you.
Do you have secrets? I ask that because as a writer, I imagine many of your personal theories and philosophies and fantasies and the like get written down on the page, in one way or another, disguised or not. You’ve also down your share of interviews (although I’ve only read two) where you answer personal questions. And you’re very candid, very refreshing.
I guess I wonder if you have boundaries that you don’t cross in interviews, or even on the page. Things that you keep close and keep closed, if you would.
Writers always say that if you can’t tell the truth about yourself then you can’t tell the truth about others, and that in order to write — really write — you have to be willing to be excruciatingly honest with yourself, no holding back. You write and by doing so you look at yourself in the mirror (so to speak) and write from what you find. When that happens, when you write a novel, when you do an interview, do you feel hollowed out afterwards? Are there things you hide from the general public (which I realize would include me)?
I truly apologize if these questions are intrusive. I am just curious, but sometimes my curiosity can get the best of me. I’m just very intrigued.
Luey
Hi, Luey.
I think healthy people have boundaries, and I certainly have them.
I have secrets, too. But “secret” is one of those words that means enormously different things to different people. And it’s meant different things to me at different points in my life. I’ve kept secrets at times in my life because I thought I would break if anyone knew them, that my life would be over…. I don’t have those kind of secrets now. They are not worth it.
But I am in many ways a private person, interview candor notwithstanding. I think it’s possible to be both candid and private, it’s just a question of where those boundaries are. I can tell the truth about myself: I just don’t always choose to. Not that I lie about myself routinely, that would be exhausting, but just that my personal boundaries are more rigorous in interviews, in conversation, in the world of human interaction. There are things that I don’t share because they will hurt other people too much. There are things I don’t share because they will hurt me too much. That’s life.
But the boundaries between me and my work are much more permeable. I use myself in my work all the time, all of me, even the parts that would hurt me or someone else in the real world. Some of those things are obvious to people who know me. Some of them, no one but me will ever recognize. Sometimes I don’t even know until they are on the page — but at some point I always do know. That is what comes from expertise — knowing when a piece of writing is true, and knowing (often only later) what it is true of.
I had an extended conversation with Robin on Virtual Pint (the “let’s sit down and talk” area of my old website before I discovered the Beauty That Is WordPress) about this notion of when/how the writer finds herself on the page. The VP archives are a total mess right now, but I plan to move them all over here at some point, so I’ve decided to start with that conversation. Here it is, in chronological order:
Meaning and vulnerability (April 2006)
Naked (July 2006)
More naked (November 2006)
As you’ll see, I’ve been through some changes on this. And that’s the thing about being honest, you know? We can only be honest (or not) about what we know… but I don’t know all there is to me yet. When I was younger, I thought that I was supposed to know all about myself, that self-awareness was a zero-sum game. And that if I didn’t have it, I wasn’t a real adult, I was only pretending — or worse, trying my ass off and failing, failing, and that any second now the real grownups around me would realize it.
I don’t think that anymore. Now I see it as a process, a becoming… much the same way I currently see writing. The more I see it this way, the more closely bound my self and my writing become for me.
But I don’t look in a metaphorical mirror when I write — I look at the characters. I don’t write “about myself.” I don’t use consciously use fiction to explore my own issues or my own psyche, although every story has some of me in it. Characters turn up with hopes or fears or dreams or joys or grief that feel just like mine…. and when those moments are real on the page, that’s when a story starts being true.
Interviews do not hollow me out. They are work, sometimes enjoyable, sometimes a chore. Writing fiction and screenplay makes me temporarily insane in ways that I very much enjoy, but I suspect are sometimes a trial to the people around me. If you want to know more about that, you can find it in a story called “Dangerous Space” — the relationship Duncan Black has with music is a very extreme version of my relationship with writing. And the way Mars feels about music is exactly how I feel about it.
Was that conscious? No. I wasn’t planning to write about my stuff. But it was right for those characters, for that story, so I used it without hesitation. I will put myself on the page anytime I need to if it’s in service of the characters, of the story, of making it true. If it’s just to roll around in my own stuff, well, I hope I am enough of a real writer to know that wouldn’t be real writing.
And no apology necessary. The nice thing about being a grownup is I don’t have to answer people’s questions if I find them intrusive (grin).
Hi again Kelley – it’s nice to see this conversation continue!
The thing that inspires me as a reader or writer is to feel the nakedness both in the character on the page and in the writer’s willingness to put it there. And, I love that it can take so many forms.
May I suggest that Mars and Duncan were the perfect vehicles for you to write about your understanding of those things – rather than the opposite. Not consciously to write of yourself (as you say) but to write about those things that raise that passion in you. And, why you write that part of those characters so well – they live in a world (hmmm, of experience?) that contains the passion-to-action that you understand. The characters themselves would not (I think) work so well if you didn’t contain the ability/experience/knowledge in the root of you to make them come to life in that way. Your depth of understanding – your willingness to be naked about it – has taken them this far .
Will it take them further?? (grinning wildly) Or, would that “deeper” place propel different characters? Honestly, I can’t wait to find out.
Robin