The Trouble With Tribbles – er, Writing

One of my playwriting professors at Queen’s once advised our class that the way to tell when a piece of writing you were working on was done was when you no longer felt embarrassed to have other people read or perform it. Sound principle. He then, however, added a caveat: sometimes, a piece of work can be a-OK, but public exposure still makes you squirm because you’re worried not what your audience will think of your artistry, but what they’ll think of you.

In the biographical approach to literary criticism, theorists approach a text as the product of the real-life experiences of the author. It is considered valid to ask both how one can view the story or poem as stemming from the circumstances of its creator’s life and whether one can gain insight on the author from his or her work. In other words, people sometimes read a person’s writing as a window on to that person’s soul: did the things that happen in the book really happen to him? Does that character indicate the way she sees a particular friend? Did he “write in” events, locations, and people from real-life?

When the people doing this are university professors who have dedicated their lives to the analysis of literature, it’s one thing; when they’re the author’s actual friends and family, it’s another.

Because, the thing is – well, for me, at any rate – bits and pieces of real-life come creeping in no matter what. The way I see people is, of course, influenced by the people I’ve met and the people I know and especially the people I love. The way I see life is influenced by what’s happened to me and what hasn’t. Most of my characters occasionally remind me of people I know, often different people at different times.

Sure, some things are on purpose. I purposely make the floor plan of my fictional high schools similar to that of my real high school because I’m really terrible at making up maps in my head*. I put in little jokes about my own high-school experience, like naming minor characters after friends** or putting the main character’s homeroom where our drama room is in real life. And when I write about all the things that can go wrong in a Shakespearean production, I draw on the time I spent with Salamander Theatre’s Shakespeare Young Company and my high school’s completely student-run troupe, Ananda Shakespearean Players.

I admit, when I was about thirteen or fourteen, I tended to fill out my “cast” list with brief sketches of real people who were important to me. (And, heck, when I was nine or ten, most of the stories I wrote were openly about some of my cousins, my sister, and me***.) But even then (except for the RL fanfiction), the real-world/story-world correspondences were only for minor characters who needed to serve a purpose in the story – eg, I needed a crowd of campers who weren’t made of cardboard or twenty-nine children to defy the lord of all evil (please don’t ask) – rather than the characters the story was actually about.

This never seemed to stop my friends and relatives from finding themselves or each other in places where I patently had not put them. My second cousin insisted the hero’s witch-mentor in my first completed novel-length thing was my grandmother when I thought I’d made her up from scratch. My mother finds resemblances between a character in my current work and my grandfather, and my aunt has wondered aloud several times whether another important character is based on a family friend****.

When people put it that way, I can certainly see the similarities between the fictional person and the real one. And I’ll be the first to admit, sometimes my characters will say something or do something, and I’ll think, “Whoa! You are channeling So-and-So today!” But 99% of the time, they don’t remind me of the same person two times in a row. To tell you the strict truth, all my characters resemble a real person. They all resemble the same real person – me. Each is (I hope) a different facet of me, but they’re still like one of those awful TV-series episodes where the writers decided it’s silly costume day, and so one of the characters gets hit on the head/goes into a coma/has a strange holosuite experience. Whereupon said character goes through a personal dream-journey, conveniently themed to facilitate the aforementioned silly costumes, wherein each of the other characters takes on a role in the dream that represents both them and that part of the protagonist’s personality. For example, the “Our Man Bashir” episode of Star Trek DS9 where everyone becomes characters in Bashir’s spy game; the X Files episode “Triangle” where Mulder finds himself and all the other recurring characters on a cruise ship being stormed by Nazis; or, perhaps even the Star Trek TNG episode “A Fistful of Datas”. This analogy has become way too involved and possibly not entirely accurate, so I’m going to end it right here.

The main problem arises when I find myself with a situation in a story that conveniently sounds a lot like something that happened to me in real life but really isn’t at all. For instance, in the novel I’m working on right now, a major part of the plot has to do with a disastrous performance of Macbeth. Now, this story was conceived as the first of a series wherein the main characters perform a different Shakespeare play each book. I chose the plays based on which ones involved supernatural forces in some way; of those, I chose Macbeth for this particular story because it highlighted some pertinent themes – choosing one’s own destiny, not allowing what other people say to become self-fulfilling prophecies, etc. And the performance had to be disastrous because, well, what sort of a story would it be if it were about someone who wants to put on a play and does and has a marvelous time?

However, I realized only in the last month or so (and I’ve been working on this series for about five years now) that I actually was in a high school production of Macbeth that could be termed ‘disastrous’ – not artistically disastrous like my fictional play, but physically disastrous, in that members of the cast are not supposed to end up bleeding during the fight scene, and people should not be stuck in garbage cans onstage through the next scene and a half (well… okay, that last one was kind of funny). It occurs to me that though I never thought of associating particular characters with certain real people I know, it may be tempting for those who know me to do so simply because they play the same parts in the show. And, as every good Talmud scholar/literary critic knows, once you start looking for similarities, it’s amazing how many you can find. Especially if what you’re looking for are clues to the way someone you know thinks about you.

At this point, you may be tempted to ask: Sarah, is this entire blog entry basically a long disclaimer saying that none of the characters in your stories are based on us readers so please don’t get mad at you even you have characters named, say, Iana-day and Uliana-jay who both graduated from to “King’s” University in “Queenston” and studied Psychology and English, respectively? The answer is: yes, yes, it is.

But I hope it’s also a little more. Whenever we did the biographical approach in English class, I always loved making connections between authors’ lives and their works – the “aha! That makes sense!” feeling when a part of a story that’s always puzzled you makes sense when viewed in light of real life. And we as a culture seem to eat up potential cause-and-effect links between writers’ lives and their work: witness the reaction to J. K. Rowling’s admission that Snape is based loosely on a teacher she once had and Hermione is quite like herself. And, hey, often it’s quite valid to point to, say, E. Nesbit’s rollicking childhood and argue that characters like the Bastables grew out of her experiences with the kids she played with as a girl. Where it becomes skeevy, I think, is when one tries to make a psychological diagnosis about an author from the pages of his or her novel.

Again, this is a tricky distinction to make. When reading the Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials, it is evident that C. S. Lewis and Philip Pullman are very different people, and I think it’s valid to extrapolate someone’s worldview or ethics from his or her fiction. What I do not think is valid is extrapolating the details of someone’s psyche and personal relationships from the same. For instance, although Rowling has stated that Snape is based on a real teacher, and it would be fair to suggest that Rowling once saw the man as something like the way she sees Snape, it wouldn’t be fair to use the Harry Potter series as evidence of what she now feels about him, or even as an indicator of whether she liked him or not at the time*****. And however much I may personally feel that Snape got a hard deal in the books, and while I may conclude from his storyline that Rowling and I disagree on particular moral statements, his fate does not support claims that Rowling herself is cruel/unable to let go of the past/someone who holds grudges, etc.

Why not? Well… to be honest, that’s a tough question, and the only way I can answer it is through the polarized glass of my own writing process. Basically, I think you can’t judge the quirks of an author’s personality and relationships by his or her work for the same reason that you can’t become an expert on the Holocaust by watching Schindler’s List or draw conclusions about the real Von Trapp family’s tribulations by seeing The Sound of Music. Put most simply, things from real life get changed when they go into stories to make the story better.

Just as most historians will tell you that you can’t think of the past as a conventional narrative or plot without leaving out important subtleties, most authors will tell you that you can’t think of their fiction as the way they see real-world individuals, events, or places without leaving out the nuances and inconsistencies of their viewpoint. For instance, let’s suppose you are an angry person, and I foolishly decide to be lazy and base an angry character in my book completely on you. That character just isn’t going to reflect the way I see you in real life – in real life, one presumes, I am aware that you aren’t angry all the time, that sometimes you behave in ways I wouldn’t expect, that some days you aren’t as angry as others, that your anger often depends on the situation in which you find yourself. But, in fiction, the things that make reality so delicious and unpredictable become irrational and frustrating. An angry character ought to always be angry, if that’s really his or her defining characteristic, and he or she can’t be only halfway.

Almost the first thing every new writer has to learn is that just because something has happened or can happen in real life doesn’t make it a plausible story. (As Tom Stoppard’s Player puts it: “Audiences know what to expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe in.”) Real people get sick at important times for no reason, but if Luke Skywalker had to postpone his battle with Darth Vader because he suddenly got the flu, it would feel like a cheap authorial trick.

Likewise, if Angry!character were only sort of angry sometimes, it would feel like the author is too afraid to commit to his or her own vision – just like if Mean!character had too much respect for his or her victims to hit the protagonists where it really hurts. All the trappings of real life – including the characteristics of real people – must be ruthlessly pruned to make way for the fiction.

So if you do think you recognize yourself or someone else in my work, well, maybe you’re right. It certainly wasn’t done on purpose, but who knows what subconscious currents float to the surface? On the other hand, you’re also just as wrong, because even if I had gone out of my way to base a character on your or someone else of mutual acquaintance, in the end, he or she would grow (or shrink) to serve the story, not you and not me******.

* Also, because one of the stories in question is set in Ottawa, this isn’t entirely self-serving: many high schools in Ottawa were built around the same time and have very, very similar layouts, so it would make sense that my fictional one resembles them, too.

** After extensive wordplay and possibly a sex change. What? There’s a reason I enjoy planning ridiculously complicated treasure hunts…

*** Usually on our way to Narnia, although I seem to recall one plot about an evil scroll/map we found in the woods near what was then our grandmother’s cottage. If you have ever been there and seen how big this “woods” actually is, you can stop laughing hysterically now, please. The best parts were my terribly inventive ways of getting us all together, since we live in different cities. The one that springs to mind at the moment was a magical golden bubble that floated from house to house gathering us together, in order to obtain the complete collection by the time it reached Cair Paravel…

**** Incidentally, whenever there is a public reading of my work at a venue in which questions are to be asked, Mom loves to demand loudly which of the characters is based on her. I, of course, always reply with the villain.

***** Because, yeah, sometimes your villains or antagonists can remind you of people you love. After all, whose faults do you know best? And who else has the power to upset you so much?

****** If you’re wondering, I don’t think “well, that’s the way the story had to go” excuses authors from any particular moral “ought”; after all, the “way stories go” is a product of the ethical and social assumptions of our culture. Turning one of one’s friends or a real-life public figure into an evil, awful villain who’s still recognizably them is a pretty nasty thing to do; leaving out certain real-life features that stories traditionally don’t mention (eg. in works spanning the past hundred years, heterosexual love is often present in the text but homosexual love is relegated to the subtext) solely because “stories aren’t like that” is also irresponsible. But note that this moral imperative is distinct from authorial intention or mindset: you might not think of your friend as an evil villain at all but still write her as one and be wrong to do so.