Your Hand Cannot Shake

I started my reading life leaning almost exclusively toward nonfiction, from Cotton Mather to Linda Goodman's Love Signs. I didn't like novels or stories if they weren't true, probably because at a very early age, I created fictions to explain how I felt or what I wanted in a way that would make people feel less nervous, to keep things on an even keel. It surprises me not at all that I grew up to love fiction and had almost no ability for nonfiction until I hit my thirties. It wasn't that the material differed from my life -- much of it was taken whole cloth. But when I wrote it as it happened, it flattened and died, whereas fiction made it come, if not alive, at least a little more animated. As a lover of memoir, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to utilize the form. What was the essential difference between the two genres? I finally came to the conclusion that when you write nonfiction, you must be sure of your voice. Your hand cannot shake. You guide the reader through territory in a way that can't be melodramatic or sentimental. In doing so, ironically you become a character, someone that the reader looks to for explanation. A story makes no such demands.

One of my favorite essayists, Cheryl Strayed, who has written both has the following to say about the work. "I love the freedom to write both fiction and nonfiction. In each I draw from the other: in my fiction I mine the actual events of my life—often changing them entirely by the time the piece is finished—and in my essays I utilize the writing craft of a fiction writer, paying close attention to character and dialogue and setting to structure the piece so that I'm not just relating an interesting story, but rather crafting a work of art that has meaning beyond the personal or confessional." This makes complete sense to me. My life didn't seem to have an arc, as Christopher complains to Paulie on The Sopranos. I would explain one thing to someone one way, the same thing to someone else in another way. It was all true, but the truth isn't as cut and dried as we might believe. It's often much worse than we'd like to say so we tell stories to help our readers understand that in fact, everything will come to an end. It may not be a happy ending, but it's an ending all the same, and sometimes that's the best one can hope for.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted." Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

Cocktail Hour

Drinking music suggestion: Young Americans David Bowie

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Palm Sunday!

Seven more days until The Sopranos airs!