Fact or Fiction?

you I'm like off that's ad hi my did in case you were wondering yeah so we know we have a very carefully allotted period of time and we would like to try to get a question and answer period in in fact we would like to have it all be question and answer but we are gonna just blather for a little bit and then we would turn over the room to you guys for your questions if that sounds okay we have an assigned topic yes which is fiction and nonfiction yes have you had the experience when people ask what you write and you say mostly I write fiction yes and then they say fiction fiction wait now is that the one that's true yeah they're the one that's not true there's something about the word nonfiction that makes people think it's not true right like non true I think or something and also in the schools like my children have the category fiction novel they're told that such a thing is a fiction novel so a nonfiction novel I don't know I don't know so is nonfiction true note I mean to me journalism or accurate journalists would be closer to that model of like reality to me nonfiction is writing like a performance of rhetoric it doesn't seem to me more true because your memories are fundamentally unreliable and yeah the shared thing you're usually writing about is entirely subjective so I don't know if truth is the right Catholic Roja strictly when you're writing let's say one of your more personal essay is dick pieces where you maybe in the course of talking about it another writer in their work or a particular cultural moment you do talk about yourself and your biography how carefully do you police yourself or try to police yourself for reporting the facts of what happened to you how do you worry about that I mean if I'm writing something properly personal like I wrote a piece called the bathroom which is in fact kind of modeled on the kind of things you've written about family and personal elements and I was extremely nervous about it cuz normally I don't do that exactly because I know if I present that piece to my mother my brother's my dead father exhuming from the grave no one would feel the same way about any sentence in it so it's always within that restriction that my subjectivity is colored by nostalgia and ideas about my childhood and certainly when my family I mean I we have competing aspects in my family cuz my brothers are also performers of a kind mother's a stand-up so the version he tells of us family life when I go and see his shows I don't recognize it you know right but to him it's the true way I'm very aware of of that it's not the either of us alike but the fact of family life is that you grow up in completely alternate realities each child in the family the parents compared to the children so I'm aware of that restriction but if it's you know if it's one fiction about cultural ideas or I write about paintings a lot I mean normally you're in you with a magazine right you're you're in a fact-checking yeah existence so you have to be very close to the facts I mean I think what you say is absolutely true I have we know we have four kids as you know and if you ask each of my four children who are all almost adults or adults now you know who did they get as much attention as their their siblings each of them things they're the one who got the least attention right right which means we are doing something right I think yeah but I mean that's what you have to remember when you pick up a book that says memoir you know when and the thing that I have found to be at times of frustrating experience as someone who primarily writes fiction and in fact it was one of the motivating things behind my book Moonglow which is a novel but it presents herself as a memoir and the protagonist is named Michael and and eventually you do kind of get the idea his last name might even be Shay bond and I invented this entire family story and I wrote it as if it were a memoir and only on this room outside of the packaging did it identify itself as a novel but it was partly motivated by this irritation over the the cred or the prestige or this or the the fascination and the um the authority that we apply for it says memoir on the front even though as you know lady just very persuasively reminded all of us everything we remember about our lives is a fiction it may have elements of the facts of it may we even if we try as hard as we possibly can to hew to the to the truth as we remember it all you have to do is ask your sibling who might have been present for the same event how they remember it and you get a totally different story or I did a story that's just different enough that it ought to make you question the whole business of using your memories as a basis for for something that presents itself as the truth I mean sometimes it's the writers fool but I think there is sometimes an incredible innocence on the part of readers I have it too but I really on a stage like this with canals God the Norwegian writer who's written six volumes about his life and he'd read a section set in you know he's nine years old he's opening the fridge and he's having a conversation with his father and the whole conversation is transcribed and the contents of the fridge and I realized that the readers listening believes this to be the case right wherefore of course none of us could reconstruct conversations we had yesterday so it's funny the way that readers was born and I know talking to now Scott he obviously understands it is a fiction in terms of it is a read act of rhetoric an act of memory but in no way can anybody reconstruct the conversation they had with their father when they were nine either way this is impossible so I agree it's it's sometimes annoying as a fiction writer to see the the innocence in front of nonfiction and the cynicism a fiction is just really demented yeah right oh yeah this whole thing with James Frey with a million little pieces when you know and everybody was so upset when that happened when Oprah he had to go on Oprah and crawl across a field of breaking glass today we all do right but but but he had taken that that very same manuscript and had shopped it around in New York's publishing houses with a with it the word novel on the title page and nobody wanted it and then he took that same book and put the word memoir on the title page and suddenly there was an auction and everybody wanted it and that was that was that I found annoying its authenticity of the personal which people take very seriously but on the other hand there is something outrageous about the fictional like I think of Moonglow and swing time it seems to be kind of the same way it's a life story but everything is like right it's as if you're an act and you're taking something if you sensibility something of your will and thinking what if my life was other than it is what if I didn't become this type of writer what if I pursued other interests what if my family were different and that does feel somewhat outrageous you know in a kind of Protestant culture preoccupied with truth it is a little bit insane to write four hundred pages of what is fundamentally untrue yes I mean that's the whole point right and and the thing is I mean that you know what when I was going around doing interviews for Moonglow and I would say and I really meant it that even though that invented family in Mungo is completely I mean I drew on little bits and pieces just like I always do of my actual of my version of my family's experience in my experience but still what I realized when I finished writing that book was in some ways act an actual autobiography even though I factually it has no relationship there was there but it's all sort of woven in it and woven through it and not maybe only I would ever know the parts that are the truest right I can be emotionally true kind of spiritually true and but still this preoccupation with others with the idea that if you that the personal is the final word I have that problem in nonfiction too if I'm making an argument that I fundamentally don't feel that because I feel something very strongly and it's personal to me or it even happened to me that that is the knockdown argument of because in the end in that I think I'm sometimes swimming against the flow of the culture because I like in a way that serve the highest credential you can write you can flash to somebody is it this actually happened to me any argument yeah so there needs to be like we've talked I'm sure before but like in my ideal version of this it's a kind of Aristotle picture where you take the pace loss the kind of emotional that moral the ethos and also the locus what is known the facts like the perfect essay to me have a piece of nonfiction intertwines those three things but but the personal part the pathos is not the winning card right I mean we learn that and you know coming up in fiction workshops when I was in getting the MFA you know people would right turn in a short story to a workshop and it would contain some events I'm incident that was narrated and the whole workshop and the teacher would all say like I just don't buy this it's not believable or for whatever reason and then they'll write or would say but this actually happened to me all right like this is true and and the proper response in that framework was aid so why is it still don't believe it like you haven't persuaded me on the page that it actually happened you need to use language you need to use imagery and a lot of times you need to fictionalize I think right I mean the problem may be the fallacy in the students mind is that when somebody's reading your stuff you are always present at the moment of reading but you're not it's not a performance of that kind you don't get you there don't get to be there and sometimes I think with the online stuff you can fool yourself that you can make the area safe that you can be there even as they're reading you can be on their shoulder say no I meant this no I'm in that minute but in reality the text exists independently of you and so therefore needs to be strong enough to be there without your boys is really interesting and your comment section yeah you can't be there at the moment of reading um so that when I'm writing nonfiction I'm very aware of that that I have to construct an argument which works in the absence of me like in your room or by yourself or on the bus I can't be there saying this really happened and it meant a lot to me and so it must mean a lot to you only the language can do that independently of me I mean you mentioned the some of the pieces that I've written that are very personal about my family you know I had a column in details magazine for about four years and that they gave me a completely open brief I could write about whatever I wanted and it was details magazine which was a men's magazine with fashion and gadgets and and I didn't quite know what I was going to write the column about but I very quickly realized that I was gonna clearly going to be writing about the experience of being a father and having these kids and being married and like my domestic sort of household issues kept coming up over and over again in the column and what that and it has ended up in hindsight that I never expected be for me and the reason I'm so grateful I did it is that now so in some ways like the only evidence there is that my kids were ever that little like I mean there's a photos okay you look at the photos like there's the trip to Disneyland and here's the time when you know there was a science fair at the school and but but in terms of the actual how it felt do you see me living with them and the and I Rick I record things they said in passing little quotations that would just would have been lost forever so you know for me it's intense because I don't take photographs and I don't I don't I'm not in the kind of image making world so it's all it really all there is you know there are pictures taken by my husband but I don't engage with photographs I just I'm just not read into the religious makes me very lonely right now the things that I write it's like sometimes I notice the kids are embedded in them here and here and there yeah like I wrote an essay about joy and my daughter's in there ridiculing us for making the dog speak in various accents and I'd forgotten that a that we used to do that a lot and that my daughter used to notice mm-hmm so it is a way of keeping the memory which makes it sound incredibly selfish it is incredibly selfish but I guess I do sometimes worry about the violence of storytelling like if you've ever known the kids of writers as they grow up mm-hmm they don't tend to be overly delighted by the versions of themselves but into various books both fiction and nonfiction I have noticed that yeah I'm still waiting for the real reckoning yeah they never go because it's quite intolerable to be written about I think that's really important we know it maybe it's right within journalism like I don't to me the worst thing that can happen to me is a profile to see my spray myself ray made into a character which is of course of what I do day and night to other people and to have it done to me I find totally intolerable and it reminds me every time that having your life codified or used to make a point or a story or no matter how benign or friendly feels forced to your reality which is huge and messy and and not like that no your ever like that I never think of that I'm gonna stop doing it every right to the very first thing that was ever written about me what liquor what my first book was coming out and the LA Times set a reporter down to I was living in Newport Beach and they sent a reporter down to meet me and we met in the bar in Newport Beach and which I didn't frequent right I just they chose the bar I think and I met them there and they interviewed me and then the piece came out and and they're like the lead of it was something like Michael Chabon just drinking something pink and sweet out of a bat of a decorative glass or something like that in the bar of the show ever it was called like the ships whatever and I was drinking cranberry juice right right I was having a glass of cranberry juice and that was the moment when I realized like oh I'm gonna get come on becoming a fictional character yeah so I should I should have known better but I I went ahead and did it anyway but I'm glad I did because there are certain things like I'm in one piece I wrote there's there's a character who has a toddler and she's wearing tights and he he has to do this thing that I had to do all the time with especially my second eye where you grab the tights and you lift the kid by the shake them down and they're pudgy little thighs are going down to thing like and when I read that I had forgotten that sort of sausage packing aspect of her daughter the book off about because to him all writing was like this but he had just had such a high idea of his own life that to him his whole over was about preserving exactly those moments for the delight of everybody how great he happy the novelist who can in case a real love letter in a novel like a bullet lodged in flabby flesh I love that and you can see it in his books right there are real things they're real ladies necks somebody's ankle mm-hmm a night in Moscow it's it's all memory preserved and wrapped in fiction mm-hmm and then he said he would lose it after that he would yeah he never has gone up it was gone he didn't have it once he had sort of squandered it in a way on Ana fiction I think the way this I don't if you've talked about we talked a lot before about these things but I realized with beauty is a good case for me of you know everything is false in it I don't I don't come from that kind of family professors my parrots didn't go to university so the whole thing is a kind of elaborate fiction but then I when I finished it I realized that buried deep inside it is a scene of like of I think she's fifteen-year-old girl punching another girl in the face of jealousy and knocking her out mm-hmm and I was aware when I finished it that that happened and that the whole novel was like subconsciously constructed in order to get that one with it yeah it's revenge this long ago teammates misery I thought what a strange thing if novels that really like that if you don't even know it's um like tiny miniature getting your own back or piece of sh warmer event whatever it is and you've construct this whole world just to replay a moment and win that's such a shabby version of a novel but for me it kind of struck me when I read that oh there it is Barry I think the one true thing was a setting for this p.m. just you punch this girl out against oh yeah it's funny um should we uh yeah what do you think up questions yeah anybody will take any there yeah so did you hear that the truth is no excuse for bad poetry that's what Edward her shoes to say that's a great line yes it's no excuse but I do find that very hard to impress upon my students that that of course the truth matters and all cutting civil discourse in journalism and but here the kind of truth you're looking for it is somewhat different and sometimes you can only get at it by telling a lie I mean that's the whole point to me yes perhaps it's more obvious in genre fiction right you're obviously not telling the truth inside for a in horror you've got some fundamental metaphorical truth it's a finisher certainly it's like horror fictions a great example it's full of the true terrors and paranoia's and and revulsion z' of the authors that are working their way out like if it's HP Lovecraft you know he was incredibly xenophobic and and he hated crowds and he hated unwashed people and and he had all of these clothings that he would feel if he walked down the city street that in his fiction come out as this sense that you're this tiny island of doomed um you know sanity and and there's this membrane that's just the only thing protecting you from this untold horror that's gonna just swallow you up so I think you know people do that he was telling a truth about himself right in a way that was it became Universal because even if you're not Xena phobic and don't have the same horror of brown people and so on that he had you can still experience that terror in your own emotion yeah that's true yeah well we'll repeat the question yeah but that's key we talk about American dirt you haven't read it and I haven't read it and what I rarely read it you can't stand these abstract conversations about books we haven't read that that seems to me the most put point that's most serious in that discussion if it is a badly written book if it is not successfully done then end of story but this kind of abstract architecture of about ideas that aren't related to particular novels I cannot I can't engage and the way that we've moved culturally from I feel like there is a moment where you would apologize or be almost ashamed or embarrassed if you had to say I haven't read the book right yes criterium daring to comment on it nevertheless and now it's you lead with that you leave by saying oh I haven't read the book but here's my opinion nevertheless yeah it's oh it's a way of making the argument safe right if I could give you a straight answer then it would be safe and you could apply in every case if you apply the argument is extreme then another like white teeth which I am NOT Bengali or old or old and white or I was in the Second World War we go on and on so as a formal argument at extreme and obviously it engines absurdity and yet there are surely moments in white teeth that do not work they do not feel correct to the people who feel themselves represented but then again a book is not an act of representation not purely it is not a civic agency it is not sending people to the Senate there's a kind of experiment in communication some things work some things don't but do it what you're asking for is a general rule that makes people feel safe safe so they don't even have to read a book they don't have to decide for that but I think it's available to anyone to pick up American dirt and decide whether it works as a piece of fiction or not that'll be very obvious probably within a few pages very good point yes sir I'm in a little bit of a mixed state my work I have been working I spent a whole most of the past year working on this TV series that just premiered last week called Star Trek Picard was that against our travel thing the card and how's this showrunner for that season then I ended up writing a lot of the episodes and I'm coming back we've started work on the second season now I'm not gonna be sure running it because I want to move on to doing other things but I am writing the first two episodes so that's actually what I'm working on now but I do have a book I'm supposed to be writing that also that kind of had to take a backseat while I was doing Picard and and then I yell it Waldman my wife and I are planning to role very shortly into working on developing my book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and clay for TV for a TV series at Showtime so that's what I've got sort of in the works and on tap right now right you I think maybe we both came off writing big books after you finish I did about you but to me it feels like playtime you could do other things that aren't that very long slog of a novel which takes a lot of will and it's just exhausting and exhausting for everybody around you as well my family is always so relieved when I finish and awful so I've been free for a bit so I I wrote I wrote a kind of weird translation of Chaucer the Wife of Bath really yeah for my neighborhood in my neighborhood in London is having a kind of year of culture and they wanted something from me and I ended up writing the Wife of Bath it's called the wife of Willesden and instead of the wife of Bart it's like the Jamaican British woman in her 50s was really fun to do because I hadn't I'd forgotten how outrageous the Chaucer is like a lot of my time was spent thinking I can't say this 13:20 but I don't know if I could say in 2020 it was really fun to see how did he get away with it how extreme the book is how wild-eyed forgotten a lot of that so it was fun to do with Chaucer have some association with that part of London nervous yeah well it's it's the idea of a pilgrimage and and the Longstreet Kilburn high road that I come from was a famous site of pilgrimage to people used to walk that long distance to various churches to see Madonna's or black Madonna's and so I was kind of interested in that idea but it was really fun to do and then we get to read that yeah I think they're gonna publish it a little parallel to spinning in his grave as I'm he's fine so that and then I'm just kind of reading for a novel this you know about it's kind of about Russia actually in 1989 so a long time ago but it's it's fun to do the reading yeah that's the best part really before you have started to spoil it yes though and that's maybe something which nonfiction fiction there's an interesting moment when you're writing a novel at least maybe the kind we write where you spend three years kind of learning about something usually something you have a fixation on hmm comic books or paintings or whatever it is but like with on beauty I was thinking about Rembrandt and it's like you take a little Rembrandt PhD alongside yes novel I learned so much right we're hand and it's the thing that seems to me most of worth to me I mean the reader doesn't have to be interested but for me I think of that period of life oh yeah I learnt something yeah it's like a little I learned something for those three years and I have it in my office I have a studio in Maine we have a house in Maine in our back and there's entire show yes that's really nice yeah the Maine yes books and sometimes when I finish a novel I want to get rid of them all like my husband wrote a novel about Papua New Guinea said there were so many books about Papua New Guinea in our house when he finished I was like I don't want to see these anymore but I don't want to see them they're taking up like half a bedroom let's just go and did here you can see we've heard some of it I usually keep a few things of each novel but it is quite nice thinking that I'd have to be in that headspace anymore mm-hmm maybe that's why they're far away yeah often that's a good point yes where's the Nydia like from for the Yiddish policeman's Union come from you know I am a lot of my ideas I think originated in one way or another in reading in something I've read so that's a good example in that I came across this book a long time ago long before I ever started writing the others policeman's Union maybe twelve years before I found this book in a bookstore in Orange County called saya in Yiddish and it was a phrase book it said say it in Yiddish a phrase book for travelers and it was right there in the languages section and then I you know I'm like what the heck is this and then I look at and there's a say it and Swahili and say it in French and say it in Italian and they all say phrase book for travellers so that wasn't the joke but right away I understood that this was being sold as a legitimate phrase book for travellers and I picked it up and like all of the other books in the series it was divided into sections you know at the train station at the restaurant Hospital you know all of these situations where you would presumably be in a country where Yiddish was the primary language of everything not just like the home and the street and you know everyday Commerce but the language of the government and like the postage stamps are in Yiddish ahead and there's like you have to say like which way to the casino in Yiddish right so I was entranced by this book and by that sort of implied country that and then I thought well when is it from and I look at it's from 1958 so ten years after Israel came into existence and chose Hebrew to be the national language there was a brief discussion that it might be yes but that was rejected and they chose Hebrew so someone whoever wrote this knew perfectly well there there actually now there was a Jewish state and they spoke Hebrew they're not either so it can't have been that and then I kept the book near me when I worked and so anytime I needed a Yiddish expression or phrase I would look in this book to see it was always there near my with my other dictionaries and so on and so I every soften I would pick it up and I would get lost in it again and start imagining and then I wrote an essay about that phrase book and and what it was for and what the intention of the authors were and then that for his book in that essay rather I tried to imagine three possible destinations that you could go with this phrase book if if things had been different and one was that Israel had chosen Yiddish to be the national language which was remotely possible one was that if the Holocaust had never happened then there could be huge swathes of Europe where where let me know you had if six million people were destroyed 60 years ago however long ago as when I was writing the essay then they would have all reproduced and those people would have reproduced and there could be large swaths of that part of Europe where Yiddish was the predominant language as other smaller languages predominate in certain areas of Eastern Europe and then the third possibility I considered was this plan I had read about a long time ago as a kid to open Alaska to - as a temporary refuge for Jewish persecuted Jews of Germany in an Eastern Europe and it was Harold Ickes who proposed this plan under the Roosevelt administration and FDR was kind of lukewarm on it but he allowed it to go forward and then finally it was it was defeated in the in Congress before it ever got very far the opposition was led strangely by the congressional delegation from the territory of Alaska who represented wealthy predominantly you know my anglo-saxon business and mining interests there but the two guys the delegation themselves were both juice which I thought was kind of weird anyway so I then I just imagine well what if that hadn't happened and I had come into being and enough that idea just never went away and I just kept thinking about it and finally I decided to do it just invent that country in a sense and set a novel there and have it be a murder mystery a detective story because the detective is a really good figure a point of view character for a novel where you're guiding the reader into a totally new landscape because detectives know their way around and they know how the wheels turn and they know who's in charge and all that kind of stuff so that's how that happened the other question oh I forgot to take my favorite sentence in that whole phrase book I think it's like number 299 or something it was help I need something for a tourniquet I just love that image of somebody like they're bleeding out you know their arm is lying on the ground and they're like just one second flipping through the phrase booklet I got this hold on hello how you say it no I don't remember I think the word tourniquet was pretty much the same questions um it's kind of a question about how you use facts and non facts to create truth it's in fiction right I'm having that right mm-hmm I have that right now I'm saying to Michael just before I went onstage I I started the first few pages of a novel and it involves after I was writing I thought I'd wait I recognized this have I written this before sudden panic middle-aged novelists have already written this a nice thought I started looking and I realized I'd used it in a piece of nonfiction so at the very beginning of a novel something true happens it was I was I was at Buckingham Palace with a lot of other people and I was trying to sit down to lunch and then suddenly looming over me was Margaret Thatcher who was a kind of ghost of my childhood a ghoul of my childhood and she was with Princess Anne and I was with a few people and Poisson just said you move we went okay moved but I I was thinking about yes extraordinary it was actually image and I wrote about it in some nonfiction then it appeared in the novel it it's the beginning of that really happened yeah really happen if it's the only thing in the novel that's true in in in that sense but it's to begin a novel about Russia in my in 1989 I went to Russia with a lot of kids my age 15 I was there for a month I don't remember anything about that trip like I remember maybe three things and I was there for a month so that's a good example of like an absence I know I was there I know it happened but I don't remember anything so the whole thing will be a fictional construction so then to make the world you read right you read I was spending all my time now reading books about Russia in the 80s getting all the facts I can to create what is the kind of the best way to put it like a viable framework for a story what you're always looking for is its believability that's the best thing I can say because in every line the reader has absolute freedom to say no I don't believe you I don't believe this I don't believe that and it's not based on on what factually happened but on what feels intellectually and emotionally possible like it could be true so creating that world is is strange is a mixture of this kind of structure which is fact most of which by the way will never appear in the novel most of the reading you do would you say we search for a novel is like the bottom of Hemingway's Mountain it's just there you see the top above the water that's the novel everything else is like this invisible structure that supports it and maybe just gives a writer confidence as they move through this imagined world but it is always imagined and even if we were constructing our afternoon now so much they were are the facts you all hear us on this tape on this diet days and we can recreate that in prose but so much of what goes on is inside of me inside of you and and imagine the mixture of fact and fiction is constant as far as I can tell but it needs to be within the realms of believability so if I say the room in the library had you know two dragons outside and was melting I've crossed the line in which you can't join me but if I if I bring it within the realm of believability lots of things can be said and expressed that are somehow different from journalism to me they have a kind of fictional truth about what was felt I think that's right I mean I think ladies making a really important point and I think what the second part that you were asking about like Hollywood films that that are presenting themselves as the truth in some way that you know they might start out with a slight disclaimer that says this film is based on real events something that actually doesn't mean anything right there's no legal that's not a legal statement it doesn't tell you anything and then you watch like the recent examples that movie the aerialist is that what at the air or not they are knots right where they took this story about this real life whether scientist in Victorian England who made several balloon of a sense with other male balut the balloonists themselves were were male and he had this big adventure on this one flight and they took bat carrot that the sort of balloonist character and turned it into a woman which is fine except it's no longer it's it becomes a complete work of fiction at that point sort of loosely based on the figure of one of these figures and you know if you wanted to make a movie about a female aeronaut there a number of them during that same period you could you could chose to tell a story about them I don't know I didn't I actually kind of enjoyed the movie but at what it bothered me was the way that it presented itself with this little disclaimer at the beginning as being the truth on some level when it is it but that's not what novels are doing at all novels are doing the opposite a novel says you know when you pick up a novel it says novel even if it doesn't implicitly there's a contract you know it's a lie when you pick it up you it's it that's why you're reading it and and and the writer saying to you I'm going to lie to you okay all right do I have your consent to do that and the reader says please lie to me make it a good one right that's what's happening with a novel it's just like when you go see a magician on stage you know and you know they're not really turning a rabbit into a bouquet of flowers that's impossible but you you you know it's a trick you know you're going to be deceived and that is what you're there for is to be deceived really well and that same implied contract exists between the right a fiction writer and the reader and so what then your responsibility as a writers to make that lie as good as you possibly can as effective as you possibly can and it turns out a big part of that as anyone who's ever told a good lie knows is to put some facts in it right to mix so so if you're writing a novel set in Russia in the late 1980s even if you're making the entire story up and all the characters are invented and the incidents are invented you still want to be able to hand that novel to somebody who is in Russia in 1989 and hope that they read it and say oh yeah that she actually I remember that or she got that right and sometimes of course what happens is if your lies the lie starts to UM shape retrospectively your experience as a reader of the place that you you might have been and it makes people see it differently than it was and sometimes that can be very uncomfortable for the writer so I had people come up to me after the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and clay came out I had and this was a pre just the Internet and the web existed but they were not what they are today and people come up and say or can I get some Joe cavalier artwork like original Joe cavalier artwork you know and the liar a part of me the magician part was really gratified by that but like I fooled you so completely that you think there's a there actually was such a person but the the the the human the man in me was was upset and embarrassed by that and also felt a little sorry for the gullible person too but yeah you know I had a woman come up after you dish policeman's Union came out and she said you know my husband and I we took a cruise in the inner passage last year we were in Sitka I don't remember all those tall buildings being there yeah and then you're just like I don't know what to do for you but but you know so you're using even not necessarily just facts like dates and chronologies and architecture and all that but but simply what the weather is like in that place that you're writing about you're trying to use every possible tool you can of what so called reality to make your life more persuasive and more effective I think there is there may be like thinking of the American to that question like I just read a novel by a Mary Wright famous in New Zealand I'm gonna forget her name like an idiot she's in her 80s now but I was reading this book about the Mary's a novel and it was incredibly beautiful Patricia grace very famous in New Zealand I thought this is such an extrordinary novel and I had to confess to myself that the way absolutely believe in this boundless novelistic imagination it would not be possible to write this novel without having a deep foundation in this particular world that's true it's not that there's something magical about Mary culture that's true of the novel of Palm Springs the novel lives nor an island there's a certain deep level of knowledge that if it could be faked I would call that novel the purest work of genius if you could do such a right I think it's incredibly hard to do but I still we're reading it that there were things in here it's not just about facts like she knows this and that about Mary culture not that but just a deep familiarity which is a kind of baseline which is incredibly hard to invent it's really true I mean I was imagining writing a novel one character in the novel was going to be possibly a mixed-race african-american white woman who grew up in the 30s and 40s and 50s and came of age and that was born and lived in the 40s and 50s and came of age really in the 60s and um and then I read Margo Jefferson's Negro Lin and but a somewhat different kind of background but it's a memoir and that really that had that same experience like I could have done all the research in the world and there's something amazing that I just never would have known I never would have understood I wouldn't have known what they said if the subject of the subject of Eartha Kitt came up for example and my fictional narrative I wouldn't have know what to say about how Eartha Kitt might have been viewed or seen in 1960 by by a young black woman up you know and there it is a marker Jefferson's book and that it's something that trivial miss Underwood have known that I never would have been able to come and then also the trick of fiction is the restriction of perspective right like like swing time I was aware the character was going to go to West Africa I'm not West African but one of the viable perspectives of fiction too is that over the tourists that of the unknowing person who enters the world going on here right that's an experience we all have everyday of not knowing of being unsure of not total knowledge is not the only perspective fiction can come from so I'm interested in fictions which have limited knowledge of what they're entering because that's that's a genuine human experience absolutely I mean you see that in opinion right and then again in Lolita in a way - yeah this experiment the experience of America through the eyes of somebody early in the 50s anyway through the eyes of somebody that doesn't really understand the country at all right and then sometimes I mean I was younger and and much less fearful but sometimes I remember writing white teeth one the main things I told myself is that people aren't experts in themselves that best way to put it so you know not every young Muslim walking around London knows every word of the Koran obviously I know from my own self that what I call my culture I know in a half last way or partly or but so knowing that about people or believing it when I was 20 allowed me to write that but to know that people don't walk around with total knowledge of themselves of their couples of their culture God knows of them of their holy books no they walk around kind of stumbling like the rest of us and a narrative perspective which allows for that limitation in people can be freer you know I don't if I could do it now I wouldn't have that confidence but that's just the gap between 20 and 40 times their arrogance yeah we have two more minutes so I shouldn't you know how the arc of the story you know how the story ends with nonfiction but with fiction you don't so do you plot it out first of all I'm not sure even with nothing like if you're writing about the Civil War where does it really end you know this is then with the signing of the Treaty of Appomattox or the assassination of Lincoln shortly thereafter or does it in with reconstruction or you know as it is it over yet yeah so sometimes even with nonfiction you wouldn't necessarily know where the story ends I think it just depends like I was reading a crime novel by a friend of mine a few days ago Christopher Boland and it was just expertly plotted there's no way he could have started it without knowing exactly where it was going who was getting murdered when and I don't write like that I can't even imagine it but I was very in life to the satisfactions of it I was like this is well plotted I really enjoyed it I could learn a lot from my friends huh I don't I don't do that I kind of start with a mood color scene I usually have unfortunately probably some argument in mind I know I do that just as in my essays I I'm trying to make some point no matter how many times I say on stage oh I don't have any I certainly am arguing something so then trying to make the story I suppose reflect that argument without making it too dogmatic or feeling that your force but the ending is almost always a surprise in my case but I don't call that a good way of proceeding now I'm very much I groped my way along no sense of where I'm going a lot of the time yeah I take a lot of left turns that lead nowhere and dead ends and I end up throwing away dozens or hundreds of pages sometimes it's a reading both are novels you would know that this was fair to say that yeah I mean it's not uh um but it then again when I do figure things out in advance then I feel like what's the point of right I know like a know all the energy I know what the story is why tell it yeah the mystery needs to be there otherwise you can't get up in the morning and do it in case anyway hey we're out it that's it thank you [Applause]

Channel: Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

Views: 4,680

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: fjO_L4hEMIA

Length: 45min 1sec (2701 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 11 2020