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Meet Me in Syracuse 1/5/2013 1:07:50 PM
Among the hazards and pitfalls of novel writing, perhaps the danger of having people recognize themselves in the characters, or think they do, is the greatest of all. It can create heartbreak.
They say we see our own faults reflected in others. This seems to be true also of what we write. I’ve just written a review of a novel called Twice Begun, in which the author, in my opinion, faced a problem similar to my own in my book, I’ll Meet You in Syracuse. I realized only afterward that in the review I was speaking for myself as well as for the other author.
In Creative Writing classes, we are repeatedly told that we must write what we know. Good novelists draw on their own experience for their stories. This means creating characters who resemble those we deal with in real life. But life lacks unity and consistency. The material must be molded and shaped; otherwise it’s reportage. Just as in the other arts, it’s what you do with your material that makes the difference.
For example: to write of the experience of having a spouse walk out on his family unexpectedly, you must first portray a spouse capable of doing that sort of thing. A warm and caring man who suddenly walks out is not believable and your story falls apart. This happened in the book Twice Begun. The husband and father was an immigrant from France, but not the old fashioned kind, not the hard-up European seeking opportunity in America. On the contrary, he was the son of a well-to-do family, owners of a winery, a family which had never accepted his American marriage. While apparently adoring both his wife and child, he yet felt a great nostalgia for his homeland, and this manifested itself in his singing French songs and telling French stories to his daughter. Also, it seemed that, after nine or more years, homesickness had finally driven him to reestablish a relationship with his family and his former fiancée. When his wife learns of this, he doesn’t even wait to explain himself; he walks out without warning and returns to the French fiancée. There is no back story preparing the reader for this move; we are simply told it happened and we must take the author’s word for it. As a reader, I had a hard time with that. I kept waiting for explanation. None came.
I tried not to make that mistake in my book, Syracuse. I tried to prepare the reader for the husband’s departure by showing extended family conflicts in which he was not accepted. Then I fell into yet another trap. I found that to create an elderly parent whose disapproval helps drive the spouse away, you need a witchy mother or grimly puritanical father. Now you are setting yourself up to cause hurt feelings to the real-life people in those roles who assume that this is meant to be a portrait of themselves.
No one warns the novice that the demands of the novel are so very different from the demands of life. In life, it’s perfectly possible for the warm and caring spouse to suddenly walk out. Perhaps he’s been putting on an act for a long time, hiding a growing disillusionment—or perhaps he’d fooled himself in the first place, or he’d settled for second-best and then learned he might have had first-best. There are no rules for consistency in life. People do what they do, and often we find their motives incomprehensible. In a novel, this would be bad writing. Writers must face that hazard and motivate their characters in a satisfying way. True, friends and relatives will try to find themselves in stories of which they know the authors, and they may well take offense at the author’s portrayal of some character which wasn’t drawn from life at all, a character designed merely a literary device created to motivate other characters.
I became mired in this quagmire when I wrote "I’ll Meet You in Syracuse." My parents are no longer around to be hurt but other family members got hurt by extension. Hard feelings spoiled the novel for me and I never wanted to promote it in any way.
I had something important I wanted to say in that book, and now I can’t even remember what it was. I see it only as the book that hurt some feelings. I often wonder what other writers do when confronted by incidents of this nature. I’m sure I’m not the only writer whose family and friends seek real people in fictional work.
