Pain & Art: Write What You Honestly Know | Ryan Gattis | TEDxChapmanU

I'm a fiction writer which essentially means I make things up for a living but in 2009 things weren't going so well for me I hadn't published a book in years the ones that have been published hadn't made any royalties and were out of print I've been working on a 200 thousand word long novel set in Japan that had researched for five years completely rewritten cover to cover twice and had been rejected by every single publisher my US agent sent it to at the time I was also working as an adjunct creative writing professor making sixteen thousand five hundred and sixty-seven dollars a year with zero health care and no benefits I lived in downtown Los Angeles on fifth and main two blocks from Skid Row in low-income housing and I could literally look out my window and see where I'd end up if things didn't improve from me that semester I was tasked with teaching a course in oral storytelling and immediately I thought it has to be nonfiction and the seed for that was planted by nearly two years of call me whenever you need me frantic late-night phone calls with a very good friend of mine from college he was an army helicopter pilot highly decorated in Iraq and Afghanistan and he was having some very serious problems with flashbacks during our talks he was able to put a few of those traumatic experiences into stories and that was actually how I learned that stories can be not just a way of connecting with people but an opportunity to distance oneself from traumatic experiences I thought those things were pretty darn worthy so I set to teaching my course the five essentials of immersive storytelling things that I absolutely knew worked in fiction but would be applied to nonfiction and those things are hooks they grab our attention the unexpected it's quite simply the art of surprise it unbalances your audience it makes them wonder what's coming next cause-and-effect a linked series of events one thing happening and after another that creates a dynamic chain of occurrence how did it feel explaining mentally emotionally physically how you feel in a given story helps your audience connect on a human level and lastly concrete specific detail it is the lifeblood of storytelling it convinces us now I should also probably tell you that none of those techniques mean anything without authenticity and actually learned that the hard way when I was sitting across from quite possibly the most dangerous man I've ever met in my life he was a prominent former latino gang member in South Central Los Angeles he'd heard that I had been speaking to some other former gang members and that I was thinking about writing a book about the 1992 riots and he summoned me that was that was actually the word that was used summoned and it was his decision ultimately once he met with me to see whether or not people would keep speaking to me and I was told very straightforwardly this is your only opportunity to speak to someone with some very real power I was terrified but not for myself you see the person who told me that I had to go to this meeting told me like this he said don't worry if anything goes wrong he'll get up he'll walk away you'll never see him again nothing will happen to you but then he said something might happen to me and that is one of the heaviest things I've ever experienced in my life but it was also a turning point because you saw the numbers at the beginning of this talk I was struggling for self confidence then and to have someone that I barely knew essentially put themselves on the line for me showed me that I had something of worth I've built around that sense that's one of the reasons why I'm standing here right now now as it happens I should probably tell you this there were rules for this meeting three of them number one come alone yeah number two I could only ask questions when I was told I could and lastly when I spoke I had to be 100% honest no matter what and I was told that that would keep me safe now I'd never been to Lynwood alone before and for those who don't know Lynwood is right next to Compton I took the 760 bus south from downtown and I was more than a little afraid of getting jumped so I put my real phone in my right sock and a fake phone that didn't even work in my right pocket I thought I was really really smart and when I got to this restaurant I walked through the door I was recognized immediately that wasn't tough by the way I was the only white boy in the whole place and there was a guy standing next to the door who just kind of nodded up at me and I knew this was the person who would be guiding me of course I was so incredibly nervous at this time I was ready to just blurt everything this is my name and this is what I'm doing and he just made it clear to me with a look that I didn't need to say anything right now and he gestured for me to follow him as he walked through this crowded restaurant with this full dining area on a Wednesday night Spanish bouncing off of every wall couples and families having dinner and as we walked through that we entered an empty patch of floor that formed a moat around a single table in the back corner I knew that's where we were sitting and that's where he took me he sat down and once again I'm ready to just tell him everything and he puts his hand out like he wants me to put something in it and he says phone because now I have a decision to make my real phone in my sock or my fake one in my pocket well I had to be a hundred percent honest and I figured that was part of it so as I was reaching down and pulling the phone out of my sock he was already laughing he said you know that's the first place they'd look and I was as I was trying to figure out how I felt about that a man who was not the waiter came by and took my phone and I watched it go and every step he took my stomach just got lower and lower and lower probably hit my ankles because that was my connection to the outside world those were all my contacts my ability to call 911 to call 911 by the time I look back the questions really started in earnest who was I where was i from what did I do what did I want and as I'm answering each one of these as quickly and as honestly as I possibly can I'm looking at him and I'm seeing a rather particular disfigurement that could only have been done with a very long knife and I know immediately that I have to tell him the story of what happened to me when I was 17 I just have to find the right moment and I shouldn't have lost my train of thought because that's when he really hit me and he said uh so you're a writer but um published anything in a really long time you know I had these amazing reasons for why that wasn't the case you know the economy was really bad at the time the publishers were going through all manner of awfulness they were merging they were going out of business also no one got what I was writing and that hurt me the most but I looked this man in the eyes and I just said it wasn't good enough and he caught that past tense and he said so when did you let it go and I had to tell him said I was in Kansas I was at my grandmother's house I hadn't seen her in years you know and during that time I had this relentless positivity I just kept telling myself if I work harder everything will be fine so this woman who was sitting at this table in that chair she turns to me and she's never asked anyone an empty question in her life and she said how are you doing and I said fine she looked right into me she said you're not fine and I swear when she said that something broke inside me and when I told him that he just nodded his head like he understood how grandmother's could be all-knowing and for just a moment it was quiet and I pounced on it because yes I was told I couldn't ask questions but they didn't say I couldn't tell a story so I said when I was 17 years old I was standing at the back of my high school student council class I was standing next to an offensive lineman from the football team aptly nicknamed lump who just so happened to be tripping on acid at the time and to my left was my classmate and whom I would much rather have been speaking to and lump says hey do you want to play fight I said no and I turned and I shouldn't have I didn't feel his elbow hit me I just saw a flash of black something popped inside my head my ears rang and I started walking on autopilot up the central aisle of classroom I look down at my soccer jacket which had a white triangle on it and explosive flecks of blood and I just remember thinking that's never coming out I was my first experience with the banality of shock how something so small and simple and everyday can seem important in a moment of emergency I took one more step and the blood came pouring out of my nose just fountain this at a pace I've not seen since except in horror movies and hours later I was sitting in the office of a visiting Swedish surgeon ear nose and throat who was on a fellowship at Colorado College and he was giddily telling me that my nose break was one in a million because the nasal bone hadn't actually fractured the force of the elbow had hit me in such a way that it tore all the cartilage out of my nose and put it on the side of my face in a wide J I had two facial reconstructive surgeries they wanted to do a third but I said no I just couldn't take it anymore it was about a year before I could properly smell and taste again and when I told that to the man sitting across from me moment by moment I noticed his guard go down and he pulled his chair up and he leaned forward and as soon as I was done he asked questions about my treatment my surgeries my nerve damage and I realized pointedly that I was speaking to someone who was fluent in pain but I realized something else and it was simply that my story had changed the space around us it was no longer about how I looked or where I was from or how he looked or where he was from it was about being human together it was about empathy you can say it built a bridge and believe it or not this bridge actually stands to this day he and I still talk he still laughs when he tells me the story of meeting me and how he told some of his old homies that it was okay they could talk to me and even though I'd been researching prior to that moment that night absolutely began my Odyssey with all involved now I know I was extremely pure occupied with numbers at the start of this talk so I hope you can forgive me if I focus on just two more in 2014 when my US agent took my novel to auction no publishers said no zero I still don't know how I feel about that when it was published this year it became my first book published in ten years and in some places it was treated as a debut because I've been gone so long that people forgot about me and yet my book was the very first piece of writing where I very conscientiously made sure to put the five essentials of immersive storytelling in there every page every paragraph every sentence hooks the unexpected cause and effect how did it feel concrete specific detail but again none of this matters without authenticity authenticity is a magnet it might seem small and simple but it commands an invisible power it determines whether or not your audience takes your story home with them and thinks about it I did two and a half years of research and background for all involved I spoke to graffiti guys firefighters former gang members nurses California Highway Patrol officers and more it was an incredibly diverse group of people I always told them my story I was always honest with them I carried that forward and I realized something authenticity in practice is not invisible it can be heard in your tone it can be seen in your body language it can be felt by your listener authenticity is basically a way of saying I trust you to see who I truly am and ironically it was by doing that opening myself up that I learned how to see others better it had a dramatic impact on my writing my prose became more empathetic more human which is really all I ever could have asked for except maybe one thing I don't live in that 215 square foot apartment anymore I moved and I moved on but I still carry it with me and I could tell your story about

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 265,827

Rating: 4.9153295 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Art, Creativity, Writing

Id: PG3tp2oA3xo

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2015