Life v. Fiction: By Elizabeth Stark

Life just has no sense of pacing. Plot events come rushing, pell mell, with no opportunity to make sense of them: people die, people break-up, storms rage causing airplane delays mostly, or national crises, cats disappear, jobs are won and lost, children born . . . and then there are days and days of jumbled routine, of indistinguishable hours and mundane chaos. The build up in life is often followed by disappointment, a place far beyond where, as an editor, I might suggest ending the chapter.

Begin your tale in media res, in the middle of the action, and end it there, too. Pick dramatic moments and create a build, as the tension rises. Character. Desire. Obstacle.

Yes.

Life has all of these elements, has its dramatic moments (often too many of them), is always in media res. But the build is off. The tension doesn’t always rise and when it does it often has more to do with who hasn’t gotten enough to eat, whose coffee is yet to be brewed.

In a workshop I taught this spring on the short story, a stellar writer wrote a powerful autobiographical piece. She couldn’t read it without crying, and afterwards she wondered if all her writing ought to make her feel that split open, if there was something missing from her more fictional work. And yet how could one survive being that vulnerable, that sad, through the hours of a daily writing practice?

Recently I had the chance to respond to some of her fiction, and I saw ways to address and answer her question; I saw ways that we let ourselves and our characters off the hook when we write fiction. Because let’s face it: the hardships of life are not our first choice. Death? What a terrible idea. Oh yes, I understand the problems of overpopulation and even the ways that eternal life could be more than one could handle, just in terms of doing the dishes and sweeping the floor, but when my very own parent departed this earth (or was sunk deep into it), I could only rage against the machine. Death sucked. I wouldn’t choose it for the characters in my life whom I love and it’s hard to choose it for the characters in my fiction. Conflict? Bad luck? Devastation? No way!

Here’s what I think might be the key to that powerful personal, autobiographical writing that she did at the short story workshop: she let the stakes be hugely high. Because it was based on real life, she didn’t let the character off the hook, didn’t make it okay after all or tack on a happy ending. It wasn’t a tragedy, either, it was just life, full-blown life, where we get desperately sad and wildly disappointed and nothing rescues us from those feelings, even if we don’t stay stuck in them. I think we often stand in between our characters and the brute force of life in a way we can’t do for ourselves in our memoires.

Here’s another thing I think happens in fiction. We are writing at our desks; we have achieved a certain measure of calm reflection; we are inventing, and the crashing force of life is at a remove. In fiction, feelings surprise us. In life, we know what fragile, nearly broken, broken-hearted creatures we are. In life, it’s the daily actions of living, the normal routines that surprise us more than it is that a storm of feelings threatens to overturn us when the crucial moments are upon us.

And yet, we want—need—to read about struggles, about the hard stuff—because that is life, and because it is story, because books teach us how to live, how to survive, and because all happy families are alike and no family was like ours.