{"id":2904,"date":"2020-03-11T09:26:14","date_gmt":"2020-03-11T14:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/?p=2904"},"modified":"2020-03-11T09:26:15","modified_gmt":"2020-03-11T14:26:15","slug":"when-truth-is-not-enough-from-non-fiction-to-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/when-truth-is-not-enough-from-non-fiction-to-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"When Truth is Not Enough: From Non-Fiction to Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

The decision seemed trivial.\u00a0 Nick and I were cleaning out my parent\u2019s farmhouse after they died.\u00a0 Only my mother\u2019s piano was left, a big clumsy thing with pock-marked and tuneless keys.\u00a0 Phil, the caretaker, couldn\u2019t find anyone to take it.\u00a0 We quietly stared at it together until Phil finally said, \u201clet\u2019s burn it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seemed like a crazy idea.\u00a0 Who burns a piano?\u00a0 At the same time, it was an eminently practical solution.\u00a0 We helped Phil wrestle the piano into his truck.\u00a0 He took it to the field behind the barn, drenched it with gas and tossed a match.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I got a tremendous response when I told this anecdote to friends at dinner parties.\u00a0 They slapped the table, roared with laughter at the thought of a burning piano and then asked what we did with all the metal pedals and wires.\u00a0 They wanted the visual details, but I had none.\u00a0 We were in a hurry to get home and hadn\u2019t bothered to watch the blaze.<\/p>\n

My attempts to turn this incident into a memoir piece failed.\u00a0 This anecdote could hold the interest of family and friends who knew me and my parents and appreciated the burnt piano as a wonderfully creative solution to a vexing problem.\u00a0They could provide the back story.\u00a0 The issue was that this decision, driven by convenience, was not enough for my larger target audience of STRANGERS.\u00a0 I needed to add tension and a stakeholder, but the only stakeholder in this story was the piano who faced imminent immolation.\u00a0 It was time for FICTION, a new genre for me.<\/p>\n

At first I thrilled to the idea that, as narrator, I could invent a better version of myself. \u00a0Perhaps I should be embarrassed to mention this, but I feel I\u2019ve set a high bar for a good daughter.\u00a0 To do better, I\u2019d have to find a community center or an old peoples\u2019 home, offer to rehab the piano, rename the room in honor of my mother and then lead a rousing chorus of Koom-Bay-Ya\u00a0 That\u2019s not going to happen.\u00a0 I insist on torching the piano.<\/p>\n

I was equally unenthusiastic about creating the worst version of myself, a spiteful daughter who finds catharsis by destroying her mother\u2019s prized possession. Other possibilities included a wild, drug-filled weekend with the burning piano a stand-in for a funeral pyre.<\/p>\n

After multiple revisions this layered story still languished.\u00a0\u00a0I was seduced by the piano and could focus on adding more visual details, a spray of sparks against the cobalt sunset (I have changed the sunset color many times) sharing shots of whiskey with the crusty caretaker, adding flecks of chaw to the whiskey, sitting on overturned buckets to watch the fire.\u00a0 \u00a0I was stuck in a non-friction rut of truth and convenience.<\/p>\n

Then it hit me.\u00a0 I had to step aside.\u00a0 Entirely.\u00a0 Get out of the way and create a whole new \u201cnot me\u201d person.\u00a0 I wrestled with writing a character entirely from my imagination, far from my serene childhood with supportive parents.\u00a0 The burning piano could still provide the novelty to an otherwise stale story line of a daughter coping with a parent\u2019s death.\u00a0 Seriously, who burns a piano?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I interviewed several candidates for the narrator role, invited them into my office, stared into their eyes.\u00a0 I lectured these figments in my sternest \u201cI mean it voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCould you please hate your mother a little bit, or at least not like her so much.\u00a0 Give me some workable facts.\u00a0 Remember this is a short story, so I only have 5,000 words to get in and out.\u00a0 Maybe you hated it when she made you practice the piano. \u00a0Maybe you always felt like a disappointment in her presence.\u00a0 That could work.\u00a0 Just don\u2019t tell me that burning the piano was convenient.\u00a0 I\u2019ve tried that, and it doesn\u2019t provide enough tension.<\/p>\n

Let your imagination run. \u00a0You can do it; I know you can.\u00a0 And while you\u2019re at it, gain or lose a bunch of weight, change your hair color.\u00a0 I\u2019m tired of you looking like me.\u00a0 Readers love physical details.\u00a0 Maybe a lisp or a limp? \u00a0Never mind, a limp would be too contrived and writing a lisping dialog would annoy readers.\u00a0 Mark Twain could pull off a dialect, but I\u2019m no Mark Twain.<\/p>\n

How about something au courant, like a sleeve tattoo?\u00a0 Feel free to change your gender as long as you stick to the binary.\u00a0 None of this fluidity stuff.\u00a0 By the way, don\u2019t add physical details just for the hell of it, and please don\u2019t have the character look into the mirror as the way to describe herself.\u00a0 That is my pet peeve.<\/p>\n

Stop whining. \u00a0I bet you enjoy being the star of this little piece, even if you are one-dimensional.\u00a0 I can change all that.\u00a0 Unless you shape up, I\u2019ll write you out, put in an omniscient third person narrator, turn you into a bystander.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My alters stands nervously in the doorway, her presence fading with successive revisions until she is a wispy sylph.\u00a0 But I can see it in her eyes, begging me to be gentle and kind, no vindictive rough stuff.\u00a0 I think I can accommodate her, but I\u2019m still not there yet, sucked in by tinkering with the scene.\u00a0 That is much easier than the deeper story.\u00a0 My latest revision includes the strange \u201cmusic\u201d the piano makes as the wires pop off in the heat.<\/p>\n

The narrator\u00a0slowly takes shape.\u00a0 The carefully scripted funeral she (i.e. not me) organized in her mother\u2019s suburban church was beautiful, but lifeless.\u00a0 She\u2019s discovered that her mother is a different person at this weekend getaway.\u00a0 She drops f-bombs right and left, shovels shit, and knows how to call the renderer to dispose of the bloated corpse of a dead cow. In this framework, the burning piano is a perfect send-off for an unexpected life well-lived.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s this week\u2019s version anyway.\u00a0 As I sift my way through the infinite truths of fiction, I take comfort in glancing over at the patient flame of my burning piano.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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The decision seemed trivial.\u00a0 Nick and I were cleaning out my parent\u2019s farmhouse after they died.\u00a0 Only my mother\u2019s piano was left, a big clumsy thing with pock-marked and tuneless keys.\u00a0 Phil, the caretaker, couldn\u2019t find anyone to take it.\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-i-did"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-KQ","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2904"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2909,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904\/revisions\/2909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}