Look closely...

In her advice to a young writer, Collette said, "Look closely at what you love, but look most closely at what hurts." Stands to reason, since the most painful things in life are the most unresolved, the most likely to haunt a lively sleepless night, with long-past friends, enemies, and lovers always waiting for your visit.

My husband gave me a jumpy look when I asked if he'd read my last post. "I don't know what that was about," he said. "It really came at me sideways," and he gave a little shudder. It was one of those shudders I've come to recognize in my readers, a small twitch that means, Who are you writing about, and why are you doing it? I mumbled something about wanting to show how fictional characters are created, and that was true enough. But I also remembered another writer's quote, one by Joan Didion, "A writer is always selling someone out," she said, and she's right as far as she goes.

Family and friends are naturally spooked by those bright recognizable scraps of themselves they spot in print. But scraps is all they are. A scrap is what you begin a story with, usually a scrap of pain...a conversation that didn't go well, a relationship that was never meant to be, a small lie, a forced act of kindness, words said out of pity, a misplaced silence.

Perhaps you begin writing with actual people in mind, perhaps you try with all your heart and skill to make them as real as they were in a certain place, at a particular time. Try it out for yourself. Maybe you'll find, as I have, that the more you work with what you've staked out as reality, the more like scarecrows your characters will be...dummies pasted together with chewing gum. I think that's because fiction exists as another reality, with its own physical laws, its own dreams, its own myths, its own people, and those are only revealed in the writing. Word by word, draft by draft.