Somebody’s telling of an event that took place – or allegedly did – and I find myself evaluating it through an either/or lens. This wouldn’t fly as fiction (nobody would believe it) or, oh yes, it would. It’s not a matter of factuality but rather whether it would fit into an acceptable mindset.

I can even listen to people’s names along the same line. First names carry an impression, OK? I’m not sure where the dividing line is on this consideration, but it’s there. Stanley is going to have a few obstacles as a lover, right?

Another viewpoint comes in looking at what’s happening through an imaginary cameraman’s lens. Have you ever found yourself framing scenes or even wondering who could be cast as one of your friends? Just look at how they move around in the picture. Cut! And splice to this …

For an artist, reality often clashes with the ideal, I’d say.

~*~

For a journalist, at least, the biggest difference in fiction is the importance of emotions rather than facts. It means asking yourself how you feel about a detail. Warm? Cool? We’d never ask that of a news story.

~*~

Revision is where we, as writers, step back from what we’ve written to view our pages from a distance, the way a film director would or later, the film editor.

Perhaps you’ve heard of how much footage winds up on the cutting room floor. Writing, it’s the same.

For me, the cut pages were rarely wasted. For example, a lode of outtakes regarding my experiences of Bloomington went from my subway novel and on to what now stands as Daffodil Uprising. Many more of those outtakes went into What’s Left somewhere off in the future. Still more relocated to the Ozarks in Nearly Canaan and the Secret Side of Jaya.

They didn’t go exactly straight, as I recall, but underwent thorough embellishment along the way.

My interactions with the Bloomington as a research associate were much different than they had been as an undergraduate. I didn’t go to as many concerts or operas. My new spiritual and writing disciplines had me rising before dawn. I was emerging as a poet, too, and I was, most of all, newly married. And then that blew up, only to land us, hallelujah, in what I thought of as our promised land, only it was in the open desert rather than the wet thick forests of the Pacific Northwest.

How could this not be material for reading? Or, more profitably, something for the Hollywood treatment?

In preparing this weekly series about things that were behind my novels, I wasn’t expecting to see how much of what was happening in my own life during a revision could also impact a manuscript based on much earlier events. It’s not something I’ve seen mentioned in author interviews.

One of the writing adages I’ve kept at hand is this: “Steer into the pain.” I’m not sure where I found it or perhaps adapted it, but it has been helpful in reminding me not to take the emotionally easier way out when facing a situation, whether personal history or fictional abstraction. The pain is where the higher-level energy is as well as the revelation.

So add to the advices, “Write about what you’re discovering.”

In a way, it’s a reminder to write about what you don’t want to know but with the added kicker, “What you don’t want to admit.”

For those of you doing the NaNoWriMo challenge this month, may you add that insight to your energizers.

More recently, I would add to that something else that motivates me: The magic!

Or, in my case, pure wonder. Again, what do I know? And celebrate?

I’m finding they’re both essential currents in my life’s work.

~*~

Let me say I rather miss Cassia from my novel What’s Left. After prodding me to that round of big revisions of my previously published fiction, she’s gone off on her own. She was even remote when it came to my nonfiction volume that more recently demanded my fullest attention. Well, she did earn her own category here at the Barn – Cassia’s World, based on the research and many outtakes from her novel’s drafting.

As for the real-life inspiration for many of my characters, let me repeat: Where are they all now? Or more accurately, where did they go? I don’t mean the aging rockers. I can think of social activists who kept the faith and marched on, largely out of the spotlight, though they’re aging, without replacements in line. But as for the others? I’m unsure of most of their names. And let’s forget the boilerplate disclaimer regarding all persons living or dead, even for futuristic space journeys or fantasies deep into the past.

~*~

As I look back on the history underpinning my novels, I have to insist the potential was there. I must also ask, what if we had a more solid social structure and tradition, with something akin to elders? The dorm I lived in, the core of the opening half of the revised Daffodil novel, has today become something of the center I envisioned, without the radical political edge.

I suppose I could have told these stories time after time after work in a bar, but to me they seem to address a different collective experience. Besides, journalists have their own “war stories” to compare.

Just where were we gathering now, anyway? And where have we gone to get here?

A few have found a progressive faith community – church, synagogue, sangha, or perhaps a masonic order or fraternal lodge. But for the others?

Should I point back to the posts on the breakdown of community?

And here we had thought we were creating tribe.

As an extra point of emphasis, I’ll add: I’ve never returned to many of the locations where I’ve lived.