So here’s my new beef, and you can take from this whatever you will.
What’s the difference between fiction and non-fiction? Not the literal definition, but in actual practice. If history is made by those that write it, isn’t even true non-fiction just someone’s perception of the events and guesses at the motivations designed to slant your thinking one way or the other? If a story is completely true and all the events happen to you and you only write about your thoughts and motivations, but then you change one thing, is it still non-fiction? I’m serious here.
I liken it to writing term papers and having to cite sources, which is something I really hated doing. Look, I can bullshit with the best of them, and I can probably write a couple pages to try to sway you to one side or the other, but what I really hated was trying to figure out what to cite. Isn’t everything, especially now, an idea that someone else has had? I mean, the only original idea was fire, and even that was created by [insert whatever deity you like here, or Atheists use... I dunno... Al Gore]. Even that wasn’t an original idea, regardless of how you look at it! I innately knew how to breathe, blink and make my heart beat, that’s about it. Everything else I have ever learned has been through imitation or force.
My teachers may as well have invented this language that I am typing to you with, shouldn’t I cite them? The syntax comes from grammar school, keyboarding from middle school, computer from some guy, electricity from some other guy, sense of humor (if any) from my parents… I mean, where does it end? A book report on Catcher in the Rye is assigned by the teacher, book assigned by the teacher, written by Salinger, distributed by Penguin, typewriter by a French dude… I’m serious.
I had an assignment to write a paper about any book I wanted and it had to have sources and everything else. Know what I came up with? I wrote a paper about “Catcher,” using Holden’s syntax and demeanor, and explained to my teacher that I figured I was probably going to fail her class anyway and it wasn’t her fault because her lectures were very interesting and I didn’t want to be a phony. Seriously, I had this idea in 1998 (the whole “fiction not being fiction”). Look. This is from that paper I was talking about.
You may ask yourself why I entitled this “Fiction is Just Another F-Word.” Besides the obvious answer, I think that there are very few things which are fiction. Mr. Salinger may call this fiction if he wants but I will not believe it for a second. I really won’t. I believe that Mr. Salinger felt much the same way that Holden did. I know I do. Certain people can see the world through different eyes. That may scare some people and some people just may not believe it. But if you take a look at some things close enough you may be able to look through it.
I write shit that happens to me. It’s what I know and it’s what I want to deal with. I change a few things here and there, but even that’s either to make the story better or to make it so I don’t get sued. My stuff is considered fiction. Tolkein’s stuff was considered fiction too, but words like “dwarf” and “elf” have made it in to our consciousness, there’s 3 movies out about his works that have grossed more than all but 20-or-so other movies ever, 10 years was spent working on the movies, Tolkein write languages for most of the races in his world… I mean how much more real does fiction have to be before it just crosses over in to non-fiction? We’ve killed people and gone to wars for less non-fiction than Tolkein’s stuff.
It’s just frustrating, so I’ll leave you with one more excerpt from that paper.
Why is Holden worried about the ducks? Why shouldn’t he be? Where do they go? One day they are there and then one day they aren’t. I mean that would be something to know. I think it may also have to do with the fact that they are aesthetically pleasing to Holden. They are free. They really are. If they want to go somewhere they can just fly there. And in the air they can see everything. They can see all the phonies being phony. And nobody cares if they take a crap in the goddam lake. They just can
