Pre-published Writers or Posers?

Mediocre fiction writers create a world in which we can escape reality. The writing is entertainment and that, in and of itself, is a fine achievement, one I hope to accomplish. Amazingly talented writers create stories just like the mediocre ones do, but take the story one step (or twenty steps) further. Somewhere between the beginning and the ending, the writer takes the reader from his unique reality into the writer’s fiction and then brings the reader three-hundred and sixty degrees back to reality. Within that circular process, the writer takes a cross-section of reality, sandwiches it between the microscope of fiction, demonstrating reality through a fictional analogy, which changes readers’ perspectives or proves essential truths that readers fail to discern in our own lives.

I find it ironic that it takes great fiction to demonstrate reality, but the truth is that reality baffles because of its complexity and diversity. The talented writer is able to cut through reality’s baffling abundance to create an analogy in fiction that demonstrates reality in such a breathtaking way as to change the reader or at least remind the reader of what is real in life. Part of that process is the method the writer uses to bridge fiction to reality.

In No One You Know, by Michelle Richmond, she uses mathematics. The main character’s mathematician sister is murdered. One of her professors allows her to lean on him while she is mourning, but she is angered when he writes a true crime fiction book based on her sister’s murder and proceeds to use all of her intimacies as the basis. The book becomes a best seller, in which the professor casts aspersions on one man in her sister’s life as the best suspect for the murder all the while acknowledging that he doesn’t have any proof. The man’s life is ruined because everyone buys off on the tale, and even though she is angry at the professor, the main character believes it also…until fifteen years later she meets the suspect and knows that he couldn’t have committed the murder. He gives her a math notebook belonging to her sister through which she comes to understand that in mathematics everything must be proved absolutely. By her belief in a false story, she failed herself and her sister. When confronting the professor, he admits that his aspersions just made the best ending to his story and had nothing to do with truth. In the end, the main character solves the murder, changing the ending to the story.

After reading A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, in which she demonstrated just how powerless we are in life, I felt that the only part of life we could control was our style, how we portrayed ourselves, in writing-our voice, but Richmond reminded me that style was only part of what we could control. We also possess our own stories. Our stories can be false or true.

I’ve written for years. At first, I hesitated to call myself a writer for fear that my story would be false when I never was published, risking my integrity. I’m to an age and stage of life that has no room for lies. I started called myself a writer because believing provides a catalyst to the writing process even though it doesn’t increase publishing probability. In any venture, failure is an option. I’ve written two novels that have gone nowhere, and I was starting to feel like a poser.

Last week I proved my authenticity as a writer in a small way. Voices from the Garage, an ezine published my short story, “Daddy’s Little Girl.” Becoming published was proof of my authenticity. Richmond points out that a mathematical proof is the litmus test of theory. I’m no longer a possible writer, but an authentic one. It may be a small credit, but at least my story is now true. I’m a published short story writer.

The next story I will tell myself is that I am a pre-published novelist, a murder mystery writer. I hope it is an authentic story because after I prove my authenticity of being a novelist, I hope I can tell myself another story and make it true: To be one of those talented writers who make a mark on the reader, changing their reality and in doing so help make readers’ own stories true.

To read “Daddy’s Little Girl,” go to: http://voicesfromthegarage.com/story/daddys-little-girl