I’ve picked back up on something I was working on a couple of years ago. It’s very personal, and it took about thirteen years of mucking around to even figure out how to tell the story. I needed to get distance from it. Now I’m finding it easier to mess with history and reality so that I can tell the story in the best possible way. I’ve probably started it a dozen different ways, abandoning it when it didn’t work.For the longest time, the voice wasn’t true. Then I skipped around the climactic event, writing about things in this horribly poetic way. You know, almost saying it, but dancing around and embroidering and masking it with too much vague analogy and prosy description. It was like I couldn’t say ‘it’ because then ‘it’ would be true. I was scared the page would begin to bleed or something.
And I was thinking too much of the people who had been involved. About their feelings. About misrepresenting them. Bollocks! I’m a writer, and this is what I do. I finally feel like there is a story there and it needs to be told. I can stand back from it now. Sure, it remains the single most defining moment in my life. And it was messy, and horrific, and heart-breaking, and it still affects me now, fifteen years later. That won’t ever change. In some ways it feels like only yesterday. That’s life. I’ll miss her until I die.
The tale I tell will be real but different. It will be true but it will also take on its own life. Not just rehash hers, mine, theirs. A little distance makes a storied thing. Almost as if I am just chiseling away the layers that the years have added to get to the essence. I can distill it to some simple truths, and then I can make something out of it. It may be vastly different. In fact it will assuredly be because it will be filtered through my own memories and my own take on how things were. But those others are welcome to write their own accounts because no one owned her and no one owns the past. And nothing I write will be false as long as I am honest with myself.
The funny thing is that I originally wrote this in the 3rd person- so that I could distance myself- and I wrote it as a fictional narrative. In the three or four years that have elapsed since then, YA stuff has gotten edgier, grittier, tackling some heavy subjects, unafraid to put it out there on the page. I don’t know if it’s because teens feel things more strongly, their crises are huge, their buffers non-existent. They’re not protected by the soul weariness that we adults have adopted like a callous. Everything seems immediate. Desperate. Concentrated, raw emotion. I have realized that rather than copping out by writing in the genre, I need to write it as a YA book rather than just a literary novel for the adult market. To do otherwise would be taking the easy way out. And it feels right to me to write it in the first person. Usually I tend towards third person narrative. Not omniscient– I like to get inside one person’s head. For this book I need to be there even more. It might hurt. I’ll be opening old wounds. I just hope I can write it straight, face the past with courage.
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