Everything is Fiction

 

I came across this really interesting article in The New Yorker recently, from a writer who makes the point that all of life is fiction. Of which all of us partake in, not just readers and writers. Life as a series of stories that we all tell ourselves. And it is indeed true. We do! 

We writers see fictional possibilities in everything: people passing us on the street, an overheard conversation, a newspaper story, a stranger's face, a stray dog, a tone of voice, a change in the weather. We also use our own life as fuel for the fiction furnace that burns within us. We see plot in problems, characters in friends, conflict in real-life dramas, poetry in love affairs. But not only that, we, like other non-reading, non-writing people invent stories to tell ourselves. Stories that explain the strangeness of the world to us, stories that soothe and enlighten and entertain and keep us attuned to our lives.

In other words, our lives are narratives we continually tell ourselves and others as a means of validation and recognition, but mostly, understanding and belonging. 

Here's an excerpt from the article by Keith Ridgway:

'And I mean that - everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events.  Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones - they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor - please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience - with our senses and our nerves - is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

So I love hearing from people who have no time  for fiction. Who read only biographies and popular science. I love hearing about the death of the novel. I love getting lectures about the trivality of fiction, the trivality of making things up. As if that wasn't what all of us do, all day long, all life long. Fiction gives us everything. It gives us our memories, our understanding, our insight, our lives. We use it to invent ourselves and others. We use it to feel change and sadness and hope and love and to tell each other about oursleves. And we all, it turns out, know how to do it.' (Read the full article here)

We all know how to do it, we do. And those of us who profess we have no interest in reading or writing fiction are still partaking in fiction on a daily basis! Who doesn't lie in bed at night and go over the contents of their day, editing and re-reading it at will? And who doesn't go about their day without some concept of a bigger plot unfolding? Ready to welcome and be hooked by the adventures and pitfalls that may or may not occur, the advancement of some idea, some storyline arc that has sprung up - be it a love story, suspense story, or new drama. And we all hang on for the resolutions. And when they come and go, yet another story begins. 

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live is the title of a book by writer Joan Didion which explores this idea.  Of course we do. Life would be random and meaningless chaos without story to gather and define its significance. Stories help us. Didion's book exploring and explaining her grief over her husband's sudden death - The Year of Magical Thinking - went on to become a bestseller and a profound favourite with readers everywhere. Not only was it cathartic for her, but found resonance with millions of people. She  is a person who has come to know the true value of story. In this excerpt from her essay We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, she briefly outlines this idea:

'We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy; will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accident, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be - the Aristophanic view - snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.' 

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images... It is this 'narrative line' that thus shapes our world, that makes it unique and engaging, and can even at times, prove as tough as a rope, a precious golden thread to hang onto when all else is unravelling. Just as bedtime stories have soothed children since Time began, self-recounted tales about one's own life can be curative and comforting. 

You just need glimpse the blurb for Booker winning novel of some years ago Life of Pi by Yann Martel, to see this powerful aspect of fiction at play. The novel is essentially about the redemptive power of fiction to transform our world and make hardships bearable. * Spoiler alert* -The story revolves around a young shipwrecked boy set adrift in the Pacific ocean with only his fictional animal companions - namely a tiger - for company and as we will see, sanity and survival against all the odds. It ends with the revelation that Pi's adventure was a story he told himself in order to survive, but confronts the reader with the idea that life is just a story too: 'Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?... The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?'
 
Lots of fiction writers have explored this personal reflex to fictionalize in their work, most recently Julian Barnes in his novel The Sense of an Ending: 'How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make small cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly to ourselves.' Life is a story. And even more interesting, our life is not our life, but merely the story we have told about it - to others and ourselves. We are all the writers (and readers) of our own lives.

This is an idea that also intrigues one of my favourite writers Jeanette Winterson: 'We mostly understand ourselves through an endless  series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever reality we have chosen to believe in...It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions, is to understand ourselves as fully as we can. ' (From Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery)

To understand ourselves as fully as we can - we use fiction. Fiction is a modus of self comprehending. We may read for pleasure, but it is also for understanding. Same with writing. Same, with our own personal fictional sagas. 

So the next time you're accused of living in a fantasy world (a common affront thrown at writers!) - take no offence - for we all are, to a degree. We are all living in a world of our own making, our own telling. The more 'fictions' we spin from reality, the more entertaining, enlightening and redemptive our lives will be.

And whenever you hear someone dismiss fiction as frivolous and irrelevant - pah! -you may gleefully interrupt them by pointing out their own personal fictions. For everyone has their stories - love stories, coming-of-age stories, career stories, scary stories, fairytale stories and day-to-day guts-of-a-novel stories - they tell to themselves. Aware of it or not, we live in a world where everything is fiction and we are all storytellers extraordinaire. And writers by extension - are merely those who choose to record theirs in ink rather than air. 



~ Siobhán

Imagination Vs Reality: Feathers & Bricks

'They say that most of what happens to a writer happens only in their head.'

There's one occupational hazard about writing that affects me majorly in real life and that's imagination. 

Specifically, over-use of imagination, over-reliance on imagination. Which translates to unintentional illusions and alternative realities made of the fine fragility of feathers that collaspe under the weight of reality's bricks eventually, leaving me in a heap of broken-dream rubble.

See to create fiction requires a lot of imagining. Lots of wondering and pondering, fantasising and make-believing, using and over-using of this power. To live in the real world requires....a blocking out of that power? My real world, and probably that of many other creatives, is more than scaffolded with imagination. I imagine things better than they are at times. I add and embellish and decorate the bones of day-to-day life with ideas, visions,  reinvention of what-ifs and what could bes. I refuse the black and white platter we're offered and choose instead to paint scenes with the coloured palette of possibilities. I see things as I'd like to see them; I see things as they settle into mutable shapes in my mind, not as the sharp lines they actually are in reality.

I first became aware of this at a creative writing group once when a participant remarked to me after I'd read out some work 'how she'd love to live where I lived, with all the magical surroundings and people' - she was referring to all the moonlight vistas, emerald-green wonder and blue-eyed muses I'd charted in my writing. It occured to me then that this must be how I see the world; not how others see it, not how it actually is. I was telling stories to myself I realised. That's how I lived, through stories. Through stories I'd read, watched, and created myself. The fabric of my life was a narrative I was continually creating and re-creating.

So I've come to realise that I have the power to create my reality somewhat. Mythologize things  into magic. Like an alchemist, turn the cold metal of mundanity to shimmering warm gold, ordinary to extraordinary. It's like I'm pre-programmed; if I didn't do this, then the world would seem a very plain place to me. That's why I believe stories are so important to us. They have been since the beginning of time, since narrative first began with a few scratches on cave walls.  

We need stories. They are our way of making sense and meaning of this sometimes blank of existence. No one likes to be faced with a blank page after all, our instinct is to fill it. So we tell stories - to each other, to ourselves, to understand our world, but more so, to know that we matter, that things we hold dear matter, that everything has meaning beyond this sometimes bottomless insignificance that confronts us from time-to-time in the form of ennui and emptiness. 

One of my favourite books is Life of Pi by Yann Martel. In it the author chronicles a young boy's experience lost at sea, alone on a lifeboat, with only a tiger for company. (Yes, a tiger. Read it to believe...) Without giving the story away, the book highlights the importance of fiction in our lives, the vital necessity of it for our sanity, our survival, our sense of self.

So being able to tell stories is good, right?  In certain situations yes. In others,...  I don't know. I've gotten myself into tricky situations due to an over-active imaginative impulse... When it comes to matters of the heart for instance, how to know what's real and what's imaginary? How in the heck do you decipher reality when you spend all of your time creating an alternative one while in writer-mode??! You see my dilemma. Most people have 'common sense', a gut reaction, which is their foolproof guide. I do too, but it's just that imagination interferes, and I don't know which to trust, as it's usually imagination  most of my waking life.

And now I'm wondering if I'm destined to make the same mistakes over and over again when it comes to figuring out what's real and what's imaginary in that airy-fairy vague realm of love. Is the proof in the actions, the words, or how I interpret them? Is the truth in my head the pure unaltered version or has imagination enveloped it in a misty aura, tinting  it opaque? I can't decipher reality from imagination at times; and without that gift I wouldn't be able to sit down and write and create worlds out of my head and see life as great big coloured Wonderland full of possibilities and surprises.  But with it, my vision is obscured when it comes to calling it as it is. (Added to this I'm also a diehard Romantic; which results in a highly potent mix of misguided idealism, unyielding optimism and mighty misunderstanding!)

Like right now. Right now I feel stupid for having read signs wrong; putting two and two together and getting five; believing in a rainbow instead of a black and white reality. A Sylvia Plath poem is going round and round in my head which explains my state exactly, because yeah, it is enough to drive you mad! And the repetive haunting echo of the villainelle structure just goes straight for that silly soft part that actually was stupid enough to drop all defences and believe. Here:

Mad Girl's Love Song - Sylvia Plath        
         
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; 

I lift my lids and all is born again. 

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, 
And arbitrary blackness gallops in: 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed 
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade: 
Exit seraphim and Satan's men: 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said, 
But I grow old and I forget your name. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead; 
At least when spring comes they roar back again. 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

They say that most of what happens to a writer, happens mostly in their heads.... Yes, I think I made you up inside my head. And that makes me wonder now -  what else did I make up? 

George Bernard Shaw once said: 'Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.' And I'm starting to really believe that. That only in the hold of the imagination does perfection exist, in love, truth and beauty, the great grail trinity. Seems reality comes up second-best every time.

So I turn to the page, where it's perfectly acceptable to imagine, and be rewarded with the contentment of creation. The permanence and importance of it. Instead of self-doubt and recrimination.

The sobering thought of facing reality is a thorny one. But facing reality without the cushion of imagination, definitely worse.  In the coming barren days, it'll be imagination that tends to these raw wounds reality has inflicted. I need this trait to create. Without it, I wouldn't have  a hope in hell of ever filling a page. 

There you have it, another writer's dilemma. Has anyone experienced this occupational hazard? How do you deal with it? Is there a chance of reconciling the two? I'd love to know....!

 

But for now I suppose, if it came down to it, I'd rather be buried by feathers than a tonne of bricks. 

~ Siobhán. 

(And another poem, the medium where reality is tilted until truth glints off it. And apologies to Sylvia Plath for showing her gloomy side once again here, there is more to her than deadpan despair, will include more of her neutral poems in future..) But for now, here's an achingly accurate picture of regret:

Jilted - Sylvia Plath 

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,

My tears like vinegar, 
Or the bitter blinking yellow 
Of an acetic star.

Tonight the caustic wind, love, 
Gossips late and soon, 
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of 
The sour lemon moon.

While like an early summer plum, 
Puny, green, and tart, 
Droops upon its wizened stem 
My lean, unripened heart.

This blog was soundtracked by the magnificently morose, The National. A perfect pitch to match the notes of disappointment and disillusionment, for when the castles come crashing down: Fake Empire -The National

*images taken from weheartit