Fiction or Faction?

READ BY THE AUTHOR

I used to write fiction exclusively. Unpublished by choice was the idiotic way I ran my writing career while my kids were still at home and cared what I had to say. As soon as they went off to begin their own lives, I set my career to a hopeful, if shaky, launch.

An immersive experience in Denver

I started making things up because I was dogged by shame and haunted by some truth I decided on early, where the facts of who I was seemed to be hiding in everyone’s blindspot. Which is funny, because I’m shit at hiding anything. Mostly.

I found a truth early on in fiction that was hard to resist. A piece of work where everything I’d like to be true, could be. And when it wasn’t, I changed it. The entire world. Usually into something worse than imaginable. Except by me, of course.

I was intoxicated on the possibilities and read like it was a sport, absorbing made up truths like a tiny video game character hitting a mushroom repeatedly, snatching up an endless stream of golden coins. 

My craft was honed tentatively on my mother’s old WordPerfect processor with its yellow monochrome cursor on a crate sized monitor. My first story was something about an alcoholic firefighter who winds up finding out that the smart talking girl he was sleeping with was really an heiress and despite himself and the never ending hangover, he is in love. The evil, insensitive father was never going to let these two be together. Daddy, the puppet master, even left his non-existent stepson to die because he refused to pay for his cancer treatments.

All this make believe—in my head, at the kitchen table, or out loud—made me wonder about the arbitrariness of storytelling and truth. What if I could write myself into a different origin story that was a legitimate excuse for the not so quiet desperation I was living? 

I’ve penned and re-penned different versions of this story for 30 years, though the bartender, settings, and even the daddy have changed. If I wanted to be honest back then, which wasn’t my goal, I’d have written something plaintively true and pity inducing, like I stole money from my parents’ wallet in order to buy weed and friends, or that those stories of overt child abuse I made up were cries for help in a family where the delivery was so much more important than any reality.

After all, if I am not absolutely true, does it make me patently false? 

I’ve worked through pages of megabits trying to arrive at a version I can hang my hat on. I come to you with what I hope are sweet, clever tales about how wonderful my life has become and how truly inspiring my thought process is. Which I promise is only on occasion and with a mind numbing amount of self flagellation. What others might call, reflection.

This kind of essay, memoir writing claims non-fiction status, but I have been known to abuse my literary license. My point is, you can ride out your factory default settings until your battery’s dead. Or you are.

Our world is “factioned” because the story is up for grabs to the loudest bidder and no leader has been able to break it down into TikTok sized portions that appeal to enough of us. It is incumbent upon the storyteller to sell the book, but it’s all useless if no one’s literate.

The human imperative operates in completed tasks. Dishes done. Laundry folded. Lawn mowed. Ballot mailed. Enemies reviled. Don’t make me go back to the sink over and over once we agree the plates are soaking overnight. I don’t want to start hanging the things I’ve been happy to stuff into drawers, and even though I love a bed of fresh flowers, I don’t necessarily want to cultivate it.

I picked a side. So did you, even if it’s no side at all. Every single one of us is right. Which makes us all completely wrong. Not in actuality, but in the telling.

What is your fiction? Does it make sense, given your faction? Because in order to chose a faction, you should pay close attention to their fiction.

We’re headed straight for bent times and I don’t know who to trust. If you think this puts me on your side, you’re wrong. I remember when we agreed to aim for a satisfying, happy ending for everyone.

My happy place

I am on the side of children and birds and puppies. Feeding them and inching ahead are my north star. They’re the only ones worth saving. I’m still rooting for the triumph of humanity, art, kindness and a balance of nature. I pray for the oppressed and am hopeful for religious freedom. Stay out of my vagina and I’ll keep my own god, so similar, but somehow different from yours. Which I say is at the core of what most of us would like to believe. Minus my vagina and god.

Election Day is next week and I have a story to tell you, but it’s not one you’d like to hear. I’m not that interested in yours either, haven’t paid attention in years, I just hope you take a moment to think it through. Do you believe it enough to vote for this year’s faction fantasy fiction?

It’s worth keeping the good parts of America: The Reality Show from “jumping the shark” because the alternative is a place only we dark creatives enjoy, and few of us have what it takes to survive there too long without help.

The good news is, we get a choice. The bad news is, so many of us prefer horror. I’ll be voting because I’d rather die by a flash inferno of my own making than by smoke inhalation because someone else forgot to change the alarm battery. At least that’s my story.

Also, on an unrelated topic, I have a few unpublished novels to sell if you know anyone left who reads.