The Li(n)e Between Truth and Invention in Fiction

In the recent biography Updike by Adam Begley, we learn that the celebrated writer ransacked his entire life for story material. He did it religiously, assiduously. In fact, he didn’t invent anything, he merely mined his own life. I found this both a surprise and a letdown. To read Updike’s stories however, the remarkable observation and acuity with detail perhaps make up for a deficiency in inventiveness.

What I’ve learned from reading Updike is that a fiction writer needs to have a painter’s eye for detail, and this can (or used to) be enough to carry a short story. Maybe my disappointment with Updike is that he hadn’t done more than this—he made fiction look so easy just using the basic tools of life experience--admittedly not a very exciting life, at that.

Contrast this to Alice Munro, in her last collection, Dear Life, she has an addendum onto the final four stories, that they are to be read as essentially biographical. For whatever reason, I have always assumed her stories are autobiographical. Why would I assume this for one writer, but not another?

Maybe there’s a lot to be said for a writer who can take the day to day of their life experiences for story material. If most people did this, I feel like we’d have incredibly boring stories. But as soon as you call it memoir, it changes the game (Just look at Knausgaard). Perhaps as a fiction writer, you are in one or the other camp.

Awhile back I must have decided I was in one camp—invention—versus that of using material from my life for fiction. Let’s call them inventors or lifers. I believe I’m incapable of writing a fiction from life, period. I just call it memoir. And because I’ve always coveted Updike’s writing, I assumed he had a natural way with invention.

Jim Shepard’s short story approach, as far as I can tell, is to research a subject that fascinates him, and imagine a story from that. It’s possible some of Shepard’s personal life creeps in to these stories, but really, how much? For example, the details of his recent 2013 Best American Short Stories story accumulate and deliver you somewhere that an Updike-ian story would and could not. So much in Shepard’s work is joyfully inventive, and I think it is in this kind of discovery that a writer makes, rather than the prosaic details of a less than fascinating life, that are what provide the transcendence that can elevate fiction. What’s convincing is the voice, and the fantastical elements within realism, or maybe it’s a transcendence of realism.

Stories that are invented need to be convincing, or some element of the writing has to lift it above mere narrative. Is what Updike pulled off the opposite of this–that his attention to detail makes the story convincing?

I find it interesting that almost all writing of anything of psychological depth is interrogated in terms of “did this really happen?” This might be a credit to the skills of the writer; isn’t there something to being able to transmute life into a story?

What is behind these arguments and discussions about whether a fictional story “really happened” or not, is that it might make the work more compelling. Because there is less at stake, the detail carries the story. Also, a key to a story written from life is its engagement with a gossip quality. Once we know it is based on life, there’s a curious desire to figure out who the characters are based on.

With invention, the writer is relying more on alchemy of a sort. Writing from life, the story is the material. Writing an invented scenario, the material is the story (is this a canard?). Maybe the language enters into the efficacy of the telling, but at some level, the narrative can’t involve distracting language. Is it possible to write a memoir to the level that transcends the language? This speculation could be entering the curious avenue of beliefs. Does Updike’s fiction now seem more compelling to know that all this stuff in his hundreds of stories actually happened in his life?

For me, there’s more of a charge out of writing from what I don’t know. I explored this extensively in an earlier post, “Against Personal Experience”. Something I did not say in that piece was that living life might tend to make you more aware of possibilities in your writing.

Updike would just recycle his experience through characters’ lives. I think, in fact, Updike would essentially rewrite the experience as a story, but he would not place the characters in Afghanistan, or have them drive trucks in Nebraska, for example.

This is not the same thing as invention, on the face of it. I will use the psychological elements of an interaction, but not the setting or scenario. So is it simply that writers are merely using these psychological elements in more or less invented situations? Is this distinction too unclear?

What these questions might actually be getting at is the authority of the writer, how writing seems to establish a benchmark on a detail or an incident from an actual life (or rather involving many lives). If the ancillary characters (based on real people) don’t see themselves as particularly involved or invested in that incident, as they may or may not be, they will feel slighted no matter what is said. The subjective encapsulation will never be enough, or it will be too much. In Updike’s fiction, generally, this seems to be the result; he often waited years to publish some of his more scandalous stories. He still wrote it, but what he wasn’t able to reveal he avoided publishing. If readers who are undeniable subjects of a story question it, it’s like questioning the version that is being told, since it is plainly, unavoidably, subjective.

Vox Not Popular

To write to be read--to be published, in other words--is to make an appeal. There are probably reams of psychological studies about the personality types that are drawn to fiction writing (to say nothing of writing in general). Could this also manifest in the types of characters one writes--where the impulse to make a likable character has a direct correlation to wanting the work to be liked?

I learned the habit of appealing to readers from writing fiction, but only so far. If you write enough fiction, your hidden agendas take over. At some point, I stopped thinking about who liked my work or not. I’ve probably been unwittingly revealing my subconscious. But this reminds me of the maxim that Charles Baxter mentions more than once in Burning Down the House: “Characters don’t have to be likable, they only need to be interesting.” I’m not inclined to always be polite and ingratiating with my fiction, but for some reason my work has often elicited vehemence.

You have to be bold as a fiction writer, with the courage of your convictions behind your words, otherwise you aren’t going to interest yourself in the writing enough to keep at it. I remember one of my advisors once saying that she was often afraid she might write something that would embarrass her. For the longest time I tried to figure out what I might write that I would feel embarrassed by. I never fully understood what she meant by her statement, but I concluded that, at the very least, I’m always going to stay true to myself. How I do that is by pushing myself and not worrying about what people think. Maybe that’s my superego writing from the point of view of a snake.

Voice is a tack in fiction that I’ve lately become fond of utilizing. More specifically, to find the voice of a first person narrator who will cajole a reader into staying with the narrative. Or, better still, perhaps, a first person narrator who can hook the reader and perform all the mise en scène that can lead to surprise, to make the reader eager to find out what happens next. Several writers I’ve been enjoying lately have a mastery of that voice (for example, the narrators in Jim Shepard’s great collection of stories, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, or Nam Le’s gun running youth in “Cartagena”, and several of Richard Lange’s misanthropes in Dead Boys) . Although I read it for an entirely different reason, voice is what stood out for me in John Banville’s The Sea.

What is voice, exactly? Nabokov, whom Banville is often compared to, to my ears (because voice comes out in the reading-- you can hear it, whether or not you read it aloud--maybe that’s the simplest definition) sounds a consistent voice through his books, a stately, avuncular, often on the fringes of crazy, man of privilege and tired sophistication. Nabokov created this voice, arguably, or parodied it so well, with such consistency that it is a gold standard. In The Sea, Banville appropriates this voice in the character of Max Morden.

Max Morden is not a really likable character. Perhaps pitiable. Yet his idiosyncrasies make him interesting. When he confesses “I have always suffered from what I think must be an overly acute awareness of the mingled aromas that emanate from the human concourse”, I’m intrigued. Maybe voyeurism compels me. Although I wouldn’t want to sit at the Pier Head and have a whisky with him, at the safe distance of the page, I’m curious enough to want to see where he’s going.