Containing some questionable terms

While Ali Smith was at UEA this year I had the chance to ask her about what she thought of our responsibility to living people, whether she ever pulls her punches because of the people involved in her stories, and if she thinks that we should refrain from telling certain stories because they involve people we know, flesh-and-blood people, that may have some objection to seeing themselves reflected in paper – or on a screen, as is becoming more common.

She said, essentially, that we can’t – that we have a responsibility to the work to let it happen as it will, without self-censorship. Not that it always will. Some people (Joyce Carol Oates may have been mentioned) seem able to write fearlessly about personal experiences, personal relationships, so that it is quite impossible to imagine them sitting at their desk in their fuzzy bunny slippers (or at a moonlit window with fountain pen in hand) having hacked out a line or a page that cuts so close to the bone, that so starkly reflects a face they know with all of its warts, that they feel compelled to hold down the backspace until it disappears in favor of the clean white page.

A friend in my cohort linked us all to a page that admonished us each to ‘write like a motherfucker,’ which sounded like sound advice, except I wasn’t entirely sure how a motherfucker should write. Did that mean to write quickly, or intensely, or to smash my instrument in public after I was finished? Did it mean to shock, or to meditate, or to get blind drunk and invent a fairy language? Did it mean to transcend gender? 

About the same time, I was reading Stacey Richter’s Twin Study, and came to a point where one of her characters describes a group of cavemen as ‘motherfuckers.’ His girlfriend responds by saying yes, they probably are motherfuckers, in the literal sense, because they have no taboos, and that is what makes them abhorrent to him.

So, the takeaway is, write like you have no taboos. Go for the dark place, the tight place, the place that would make your best friend wince and say, “I do not talk like that and I don’t drink that much.” Go to the place that you can’t talk about but can’t stop thinking about, that might make your family upset and your friends upset and your grandmother worried, not for the sake of upsetting them but because it’s true. Write what you can’t ignore.

This is probably some of the hardest advice for me to take personally, because I’m still a tad worried about my family’s opinion. When my parents read the first story I wrote to win an award, (and, coincidentally, the first story of mine that they’d read in a decade) they found themselves everywhere in it. More recently, (last month) my Aunt found something that I’d written and wanted to know why I was so angry with my dad that I would make a character kill her father. A lot of the things that I haven’t written go closer to the bone, to places I don’t want anyone I’m related to connecting random dots and seeing proof of illuminati intervention, but those tend to be the places my mind wanders most often on its own, the places I know too well and really ought to write from.

If it all turns out too sordid, too personal, too real, there is plenty of space for taboos in the revision process.