I Know You Can’t Wait to Read My Book About Life in Colorado
And believe me, it’ll be worth the wait.
But right now I’ve got to take whatever free time I have (read: next to none) and get busy with rewrites about teaching in Tampa.
Which leads me to contemplate a show I was listening to on WMNF several weeks back about writers. Apparently we exploit those around us.
Do we?
Is every artist a cannibal and every poet a thief? Do we really kill our inspirations and sing about grief?
I don’t consider myself an artist or poet and I definitely don’t dig on human flesh.
But the show seemed to indicate that if a writer is worth anything, he or she writes what he or she knows. That includes the people that he or she knows. Sometimes the result is funny and poignant; other times it’s scandalous or embarrassing.
Is it fair?
In other words, should friends and loved ones handle the fact that their writer friends write about shared experiences and try to find the joy in being immortalized forever in the pages of a story?
Or is that asking too much?
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Well, after the lead in I have to ask: do I hafta clear my schedule and assign some reading time for Memoir #2?
I lost a relationship over it, so…
Evidently, for some people, changing the names isn’t enough.
The women on the program kept saying that people, as a whole, would lose a lot if writers censored themselves. They said writers should be true to themselves and write what they like and let the chips fall where they may.
But perhaps that’s easy for them to say, they aren’t the ones getting alienated. The author of The Bishop’s Daughter, for example, got into a bunch of hot water with her family for writing about her dad – even though most said it was in a positive light.
You must be aware of the “Observer Effect”, the theory that the observing changes the things being observed? So, does it not follow that by observing and, taking it up a notch, writing about the people in your life, you will change them? How much responsibility do you want to take for those changes?
When you write about people in your professional, social or familial life, there will be changes in their perceptions of themselves, you and your family. It will happen.
Then again, there is Murphy’s Law and the Law of Unintended Consequences to consider.
And have you considered how the people you work around now would feel about a book you wrote about people you used to work with? How will that effect their relationship with you? Your job?
Even in a novel about teaching, your former coworkers will play a guessing game about which character they are or who does that character resemble, and your present co-workers are going to wonder if they will be in your next book and won’t know how closely the characters are to real people.
Maybe this is why so many writers are asocial/sociopaths…