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This fall I corresponded with novelist and short
fiction writer Janice Eidus to investigate how
fiction writers use personal experience in their writing. I have admired Eidus'
fiction and her teaching for many years now and in 1997, I invited her to contribute
to my book, The Writer's Journal: 40
Writers and Their Journals, published by a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell.
In that book, she shared a selection of her journal entries in the form of letters
to a close friend, emphasizing that the letters were helping her write about
life situations that she was not yet ready to work with in fiction. Her words
about her journal as the place where she starts the process of writing from
life experience left me curious about how as a fiction writer she ultimately
uses her life experiences and about whether she is aware of paying attention to
life experiences so she can use them in writing. When we started our recent
correspondence, I asked three questions.
Here they are with Janice's answers:
1) How do
you pay attention to your life and to the lives of others for the kind of
personal experience that enters your fiction?
When I was a little girl, an older
girl who lived in my building in the Bronx
once told me something that amazed and intrigued me. We were riding the
elevator together, and she suddenly asked, "Wanna
know how I get my hair to look like this?" I nodded, startled that she was
deigning to speak to me at all, since I was in grade school and she was in
junior high. I stared at her high, brittle dome of black hair, adorned by a red
satin bow above her thick bangs. "I set it with beer cans every
night," she declared, dark eyes shining, "and then in the morning, I
tease it as high as I can!"
It's
no coincidence that the character Geraldine in my story "Vito Loves
Geraldine" (the title story of my collection by the same name), proudly
reveals to the reader that this is exactly how she styled her hair:
"I just set my black hair on beer cans every night and in the morning I
teased it and teased it with my comb until sometimes I imagined that if I kept
going I could get it high enough to reach the stars ...." Geraldine is, of
course, worlds removed from the girl who spoke to me back then in the elevator,
because I knew nothing of the inner life of that girl, whereas Geraldine has an
inner life that I know intimately. After all, I invented her and all of her
feelings and desires: She's madly and obsessively in love with Vito Venecio, a tough boy/rock n' roller who abandons her for a
blonde model as soon as he becomes famous.
Now, I had no way of knowing, as a
Jewish girl growing up in the Bronx, that I would one day use that image in a
story (I didn't even know back then that I would ever write stories!).
But there I was, years later, writing about a tough-cookie, teased-hair girl
from the Bronx, modeled on the older Italian
girls in my neighborhood who had seemed so exotic and fascinating to me, so far
removed from my own Jewish, politically progressive household. And I found
myself remembering that moment in the elevator -- the girl's fierce pride in
her hairstyling regime, and her strong, startling urge to share it with me --
and I was very, very grateful for the twin gifts of memory and imagination.
Many incidents and characters in my
fiction are based on my "real life" or the "real lives" of
friends and family. But those incidents and characters become transformed in my
fiction (just as that moment in the elevator did). Sometimes they are radically
transformed, and other times, subtly transformed. I feel free to let my
imagination step in, allowing it to be as unbridled and unreigned
as it possibly can be. In general, I believe that fiction that feels
"true" does so because it reflects truth -- the truth of
passion, ideals, and ideas.
2) Do you
still keep a notebook or journal?
I kept a very detailed daily diary from
the time I was a little girl until I was in my early twenties, but I stopped
keeping it at just about the same time I found the courage to
"officially" declare myself a "writer" to friends and family,and began publishing my stories in magazines. From
that point on, I no longer seemed to have the need, or the urge, to record my
daily doings.
Instead, what I began to do, and what I
continue to do to this day, is to make notes to myself on a memo pad that I
always carry with me, no matter where I am. I never hesitate, no matter what
the circumstance, to take out the pad and jot something down, perhaps something
I'm observing, or something I'm feeling, or some snippet of dialogue I
overhear. (If I were being presented to the Queen of England, and I needed to
make a note -- perhaps about the decor of the palace -- I would simply excuse
myself mid-curtsy and do what I had to do for the sake of my fiction!)
My notes are frequently imagistic:
"A threatening inky sky"; "Puffy eyebrows"; "An
electric arc of rage." Occasionally, I'll jot down a thought about a
character: "Should Nora be a pediatrician, or a surgeon?" Or, "Should
the family live in Brooklyn or the
suburbs?"
At the end of the day, when I get home,
I take out the notes I've made and I re-read them, in order to figure out how
best to make use of them. That "threatening, inky sky," I realize, is
the perfect sky for the scene in Chapter 5 of the novel I'm working on, in
which a ten-year-old child, feeling helpless and alone, ignored by her parents
and her sister, stares out her bedroom window. That "electric arc of
rage" suits the girl's father, who has trouble controlling his temper.
Other times, I simply file the notes
away in a folder I've labeled "Images/Descriptions/Ideas." Currently,
I have six such folders, all growing fatter and fatter. At times when I'm
feeling blocked or stuck in my writing, I pull out one of these folders and
skim through the notes I've made. Doing so never fails to help me to move
forward, to become "unblocked" and "unstuck."
Robin Hemley,
in his wonderful book, TURNING LIFE INTO FICTION, calls these sorts of jottings
"triggers" because they do, indeed, trigger one's imagination in the
fictional realm. I'm always surprised and delighted to re-discover the wide
variety of things that have made an impression on me throughout the years.
"I can use that!" I think, and I do.
3) Do the
things that want to be autobiographical encourage or distract your stories?
In my story, "To Boston" (also
in my collection, VITO LOVES GERALDINE), a young girl runs away from home: She
drops out of school, and steps onto a bus in New York City's Port Authority,
ready to leave her old, somewhat wild and chaotic life behind and to start a
new, quieter life in Boston, " ... a city she remembered -- vaguely -- as
filled with staid, taciturn, respectable New Englanders, men in spectacles and
tweed jackets, and women with short haircuts in belted tan coats."
The truth is that, in my "real
life," as an unhappy adolescent, I used to sometimes fantasize about
running away from home in exactly the same fashion -- but I never did. Instead,
years later, I took my very real fantasy and gave it to the young girl in the
story who shares some traits with me, but not others. For better or worse, in
terms of the rest of her imaginary life, I allowed her to do what I hadn't
done. Writing "To Boston" allowed me to explore my long-ago yearnings
in a deeper way than I had allowed myself to explore them in real life (for
which, as it has turned out, I'm eternally grateful, as I would have forever
regretted not finishing school and hurting my parents by running away).
My
fiction is, I believe, always enriched by that which is "real,"
because that which is real enables me to ground my prose with authenticity and
logic -- and yet simultaneously it allows me to roam far away, as far away as I
need to in order to convey my message and tell my story to my readers.
Janice's
answers are vivid, funny and tender, and of course, they spark more questions,
so she and I will continue the correspondence, and I will post more for you at
a later date. In the meantime, click on
Janice's name in the byline of this article to find biographical notes and a
link to her web page, where you can find out more about her fiction. In
addition, Margins Magazine has an online interview with Janice if you'd
like to read more of what she has to say about her work.
I believe you will
enjoy reading her fiction and thinking about those fat folders full of images
and the kernels of life events she uses to endow the lives of her characters. . . .
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