{"id":6418,"date":"2017-02-09T01:00:08","date_gmt":"2017-02-09T08:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/?p=6418"},"modified":"2017-02-09T12:39:04","modified_gmt":"2017-02-09T19:39:04","slug":"begin-with-the-low-hanging-fruit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/begin-with-the-low-hanging-fruit\/","title":{"rendered":"Begin with the low hanging fruit."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Guest Blogger Jan Ellison<\/a> talks about truth in short stories and novels.<\/p>\n

Years ago, when the first short story I published was included in the 2007 O. Henry Prize anthology, I was standing out front of my kids\u2019 school when a woman I hardly knew poked her head out of her car to say that she\u2019d only read the first paragraph, but would I be willing to tell her how much of my short story was true? It was the first time the question had been posed to me, and I had no idea how to answer it. Did she only want to read the story if it was \u201ctrue,\u201d or if it was not?<\/p>\n

Sometimes the question comes in other forms. What gave rise to the novel? What was the inspiration for your story? Is it autobiographical?<\/p>\n

I am as guilty of wanting answers to those questions as any reader. After reading Adam Haslett\u2019s heartbreakingly beautiful novel, Imagine Me Gone<\/a><\/em>, I couldn’t help wondering whether the novel\u2019s brilliance is in part born out of personal experience with crippling depression.<\/p>\n

I read Imagine Me Gone<\/em>\u00a0at our place in the mountains. I sat beside a lake, oblivious to the sun burning my back and the odd little black beetles stinging my calves. It was a novel that sucked me into its psychology, drowned me in one family\u2019s despair and unfailing love, and felled me with its humor, its intelligence, and its vision. It released me two days later\u00a0furious, devastated, moved, and envious. As only the finest literature can do, it had altered me. Does it matter how much of it is \u201ctrue?\u201d It matters only in that whatever tragedies in the author\u2019s life gave rise to it, we can be grateful as readers that he had the courage and tenacity to turn those experiences into art.<\/p>\n

As Stephanie Harrison writes in BookPage: \u201cImagine Me Gone<\/em> is immensely personal and private, yet feels universal and ultimately essential in its scope. The end result is a book you do not read so much as feel, deeply and intensely, in the very marrow of your bones.\u201d<\/p>\n

When literary realism succeeds, it feels like life. When it doesn\u2019t, it feels contrived. In my experience, this is the case whether the events that inspired the fiction happened or not. I have often become burdened by small details from my own experience that I try to manhandle into an evolving fiction. My own nostalgia insists this gem of an anecdote or detail belongs. But often, it\u2019s not the right thing; it belonged in my life, but not in the fabrication it inspired. The opposite is of course also true: sometimes life delivers up a line of dialog, or a situation or detail that cannot be matched by invention. When there is a risk of offense, though, sometime we writers have to suck it up and settle for an inferior construction of our imaginations.<\/p>\n

In an interview for American Short Fiction<\/a>, the lovely Rachel Howell asked me how much of my own life, and past, informed my work, and how I managed to keep narrative distance while very much writing what I know.<\/p>\n

I responded that I often begin with the low-hanging fruit: places I\u2019ve lived, my own experiences, emotions, memories, observations, friends, family. Stories people tell me or that I read in the newspaper. Conversations I overhear in restaurants. That\u2019s the raw material. And often, the initial attempt to get this material onto the page is done in a voice close to my own.<\/p>\n

But once I begin to shape the material into something resembling a story, once characters emerge, the voice, or voices, if there is more than one narrator, will necessarily be transformed. Even though some of what happened to the narrator happened to me, the voice is no longer mine\u2014it\u2019s one that has emerged in the service of the story over years of revision. The story is not my life but a collection of sentences deliberately, fictionally shaped to deliver an emotional truth that becomes clear only as the story unfolds.<\/p>\n

In the last year and a half since the book came out, I\u2019ve spoken and written at length in essays and interviews about the features of my own life that gave rise to the novel. All that I\u2019ve said and written on the topic is true. Is it the whole truth? No story ever is.<\/p>\n

Excerpted from Jan Ellison’s 10\/7\/2-16 Blog Post:\u00a0How Much of This is True? And other questions authors dread<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>Jan Ellison is the USA TODAY<\/em> bestselling author of the debut novel, A Small Indiscretion<\/em><\/a>, which was a San Francisco Chronicle<\/em> Best Book of the Year. A graduate of Stanford, Jan left college for a year at nineteen to study French in Paris, work in an office in London, and try her hand at writing. Twenty years later, her notebooks from that year became the germ of A Small Indiscretion<\/em><\/p>\n

Jan holds an MFA from San Francisco State University. Her essays about parenting, travel and writing have appeared in The New York Times<\/em>, The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Writer\u2019s Digest<\/em> and elsewhere. Her short fiction has received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Prize for her first published story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest Blogger Jan Ellison talks about truth in short stories and novels. Years ago, when the first short story I published was included in the 2007 O. Henry Prize anthology, I was standing out front of my kids\u2019 school when a woman I hardly knew poked her head out of her car to say that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[104],"tags":[1060,1061,1058,1059],"class_list":["post-6418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-bloggers","tag-adam-haslett","tag-imagine-me-gone","tag-jan-ellison","tag-rachel-howell"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43Dj8-1Fw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6418"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6426,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6418\/revisions\/6426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}