Fiction is fiction.
Consider this your permission to make shit up.
Recently, a student asked me, “If you could go back in time to give yourself advice as you were writing The Revolution of Every Day, what would you say?”
Good question, yeah? It took me a minute to think of an honest, useful answer. What I came up with was this:
Don’t cling to “what really happened” to the detriment of the narrative.
The Revolution of Every Day is set in the mid-1990s, in a community of squatted buildings on New York’s Lower East Side. I drew on the actual history of the neighborhood, creating a sort of patchwork of fact and fiction (which is what historical fiction generally does, of course). The characters were wholly invented, and the buildings were fictions imagined into the sites of actual squats. The major plot events were heavily informed by history, with some liberties taken. I understood that I was writing fiction, but I had one weird blindspot where I stuck by historical fact long after it was clear that it wasn’t serving me.
In early drafts of the novel—including the draft that my publisher bought—there were three buildings on East 13th Street united in a lawsuit to fight the City’s plans to evict them: Thirteen House, Cat House, and X Squat. In real life, in the time period I was writing about, there were three buildings on East 13th Street targeted for eviction, united in a lawsuit to fight the City. And in real life, one of those three buildings (the one I called X Squat), pulled out of the lawsuit . In my research, I wasn’t able to find any reason for that. So in the novel, I invented a reason. No problem, right? But the reasons I tried to make up on the page never made sense. I wasn’t able to come up with a logical explanation, so I tried some ultimately unconvincing plotline about the X House squatters working secretly with the City to undermine the other two squats, in exchange for Section 8 housing. It didn’t work at all. (It’s telling that I called it X Squat. I couldn’t even come up with a name for it.) It felt important for some reason to have three buildings in the novel, as there were in real life, even though I was making changes in other areas.
My editor at Tin House (the great Meg Storey, who is sadly no longer working in publishing) loved the book in spite of X Squat, but pushed me to make it work or lose it, and I ended up cutting out that entire storyline. I focused the fictional fight against the City on just two buildings. X Squat lifted out without leaving a mark (also telling). It remains in the published version only as a burned-out shell of a former squat, as an inside joke with myself.
I think I needed to go through that process, needed to write the failed storyline, in order to get to the final version of the book without it. So maybe I wouldn’t go back in time and tell myself anything. (I mean...if I could go back in time to talk to myself, we would have bigger things to discuss than craft tips.) But it was one of the most useful lessons I took away from the experience of writing that novel, and one that I find I need to remind myself of from time to time.
Even when we’re writing fiction based on actual history, we need to remember that it’s FICTION and give ourselves the leeway to invent and invert and change in service to the larger story.
I lived near the squats in the mid-nineties, and I witnessed a part of the siege that led to the eviction of the 13th Street squats, but I was never a squatter. When I was writing the first draft of Revolution, I reached out to my friend/former MFA prof Susan Choi to ask her if, when she was writing American Woman, she interviewed anyone who’d been involved in any way with the historical events of the novel. Because, like her, I was working with recent history, it was in theory an option to interview people who’d been there and lived it. I was worried, though, that I would feel too beholden to “how it really was.” She confirmed that, saying:
“Tempting as it is put your fears about inauthenticity to rest by having a ‘real life’ person from that situation vet the book, personally I would not think it was worth it. In my opinion the crucial thing is not the facts but emotional authenticity, and you can achieve that on your own. You’ll always wonder what juicy tidbit you might have gleaned had you gained the confidence of a participant, but as I say, the down side is too considerable.”
I followed her advice. I did my research with newspaper articles and old listserv posts and a handful of books written by folks who’d been involved, and used my imagination to form a composite community based on history but not dependent on it. Later, after the book was published, I met and befriended several people who had been squatters in the neighborhood at the time, one of whom, Peter Spagnuolo, had spearheaded the very lawsuit I’d written about. Peter, and others, told me that I got it right. That felt good, of course, and the fact that they liked rather than resented the book felt good. If I’d talked to them as I was writing it, though, I’m certain that I would have been too tempted to make my fictional squatters more heroic and less fully human, and would have missed out on larger truths by hewing too closely to the personal truths I’d been told.
Oh! And get this. When I told Peter about the X Squat storyline and why I’d had to kill it, he laughed and said, “Yeah. No one even understood at the time why they pulled out. It made no sense.”
It didn’t make sense in real life and it didn’t make sense in my drafts, but real life has more tolerance for lack of sense than narrative does.
As true as this is for historical fiction, it’s just as true for fiction based in autobiography. “How it really was” can only get you so far. If you’re stuck, or if you just can’t make something work, ask yourself if you’re choosing loyalty to the “truth” when your story is begging, instead, for invention.
Upcoming classes:
Revision Strategies One-Day Seminar
Sunday, May 14, 2023
10:30-1:30pm Pacific Time
1:30-4:30pm Eastern TimeDo you find yourself at a loss when revising your fiction, spending hours moving commas around while the larger edits evade you? Revising your writing can be an intimidating, overwhelming experience, but it doesn’t have to be. In this 3-hour seminar, you’ll learn tools and techniques to help you analyze your work; to see the big picture as well as all the intricate moving parts; and to then revise it to a final, polished draft. Bring a draft of a story or a novel excerpt that you’d like to work on in class.