The Dangers of Auto-Fan-Fiction
Greetings from my mother’s kitchen table. The kids and I are halfway through a not-quite-two-week trip back east to visit family in NYC and New Jersey. It’s been a wonderful visit so far. I miss my people and these places so much when I’m in exile in Portland. But.
(There’s always a but.)
But...
I’ve hit a wall today, craving a door that closes and a space to myself. I’m missing my little office in Portland (a large closet with a window, really, but it’s mine), and I’m missing time with the novel I started writing at the end of June. I sat down at the kitchen table to try to get some writing done, but I can’t filter out the sounds of the tv coming in from the living room. Not novel-writing conditions, but maybe I can make a newsletter post happen. Let’s see.
The novel is the one I talked about here, back in April. I’d been in the thinking and daydreaming and planning and researching stage for a while, with the intention of really digging into it once my teaching wrapped up at the end of June. Pages of thoughts and possibilities were accumulating in the notebook I’d dedicated to the project. I was ready. But then...
(Why is there always a but?)
But then an old college friend, Nick Zinner, came through Portland, on tour with his band, and we talked about a film project we’d worked on together a while back that had gotten stuck along the way, as most film projects do. When we were catching up after the show, I floated the idea of pursuing it as a novel, instead. It had begun as a short story, after all. Nick encouraged me, said that it had been really good, that it was worth revisiting, and I thought...well... Yeah. It was exciting to me back then, in 2018. The possibility of what I might do with it was interesting still. And it wouldn’t require research. It was based on something rather grim that happened within our group of friends shortly after college. It would be a fast project. (Ha!!!) I could bang out a first draft over the summer and see how it went, and then turn to the novel with the Beat writers in the fall. Why not? So I set the Beat writers notebook aside and dove straight in to this other thing. It went well at first. I was clocking in several pages a day seemingly without effort. What’s more exciting than effortless pages, right? Sure, a lot of it sucked, but that’s what revision is for.
(But...)
When I looked back over those effortless pages, there wasn’t anything there to flesh out and improve in revisions. There was no story there, beyond me wanting to dwell on a feeling I was having (aging/nostalgia/longing), zeroing in on particular aspects of my history, and replaying them like pressing a bruise, but rewriting them in a more flattering light. This would be a totally valid way to write a novel if I’d been able to find a story worth telling that organically grew from it, but I realized that I was trying to shoehorn a conflict into this thing that was just me feeling middle-aged and wistful. Surely it’s possible to turn the feeling of being middle-aged and wistful into a wonderful novel, but my impulse was coming from a place of slights and rejections both real and imagined, rather than from curiosity and the impulse to create.
That could be fixed, in theory. What really hung me up is that I was giving in to those navel-gazing impulses because the way that I would have to tell this story to properly center that grim thing that a friend did in the mid-1990s wasn’t a book I wanted to write. Fictionalized true crime? It felt icky and exploitative to really take it on in the way I would need to to get something readable out of it. So I set it aside. (Honestly, I’d had the same qualms about it as a film project. I’ve only grown less comfortable with it as time has passed.)
As I was wrestling with whether or not to abandon the project (again), trying to pinpoint exactly what felt unsalvageable about it, I realized that what it felt like was not autofiction, but rather auto-fan-fiction. I was putting down on paper an intricate daydream of What if my life had gone this way instead of that, and what if this friend or that had cared about me in the way that I always wished they would, and what if what if what if? Rewriting my own history not for the art I could shape from it, but simply for a self-focused do-over. Totally cathartic and fun, but nothing at all that anyone else needs to read. I’d seen an old friend and got a bit maudlin about the passage of time; that didn’t mean I needed to write a novel about it.
Art—even good art—can certainly be made from any impulse. Whatever works for you is great. But I know myself, and I know that I was setting myself up for months of unproductive navel gazing, and at the end I’d have a manuscript full of beautiful sentences that amounted to nothing that needed to be read outside of the journal I no longer keep. So maybe I need to start keeping a journal again instead. (Nah.) The good news from this is that 1) no writing is a waste of time. I had fun for a few days and got to think on the page in a way that I needed to do, and 2) I’ve been writing for long enough that I was able to recognize my old patterns and quit while I was ahead.
No harm done. I’m diving into the next novel with renewed enthusiasm. Onward.
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