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October Review Challenge, #11 - "What is the most personal moment in your work?"
So until very recently, I observed a firm rule to never put too much of my own personality into my work. Let me be very clear what I mean by that— obviously all artistic work comes from the self of the artist, in a way all art is self-portraiture. But I believe that really good stories come from empathy and imagination. So I never wanted anyone to read anything of mine and feel like I wasn’t creating fully-realized characters with their own identities and voices, just me speaking for myself through them. I think that’s the mark of an immature artist who lacks the ability to put themselves in anyone else’s shoes. For this reason, I had a rule that no character I wouldn’t make any character that could be seen to be too much “like me.”
I broke that rule with Leah Lucchesi, the main character of Dream Machine. For an experiment, and following Tina Fey’s lead in my inspiration for the piece 30 Rock, I allowed her to be a pretty direct self-insert. Though I have kept her to be as unflattering a representation as possible to keep it from being self-serving, exaggerating all my own worst qualities to make her difficult, self-centered, and boy-crazy beyond even my own levels.
That means there is SOME stuff about her that is personal; Leah, too, likes Marvel actors, finds showering to be work, and thinks writing is the hardest job in the world, but it tends to the superficial. I’ve only alluded to actual meaningful things about me with her, such as how she’s uncomfortable when she feels out of control, and her fear that if she weren’t attractive nobody would give her a chance. I’ll probably do more with that eventually, but so far it’s been only the lightest touch.
The personal moment I’d like to focus on is from Mrs. Hawking part VI: Fallen Women— a moment that was actually personal to a fault. In one of the darkest Mrs. Hawking scenes ever, our hero confesses the physical violence in her marriage. With no constructive way to vent her rage and frustration, she would hit the Colonel in an effort to provoke him into fighting her back. She indicates it was a perverse attempt to prove to him that she could beat him in a fight, which would have risked exposing her secret and endangering all her work.
That part, thankfully, is not the personal part. But she explains her anger at how hard she has to work in order to be physically dangerous when you’re a woman— particularly in comparison to men. She talks about how a woman has to completely transform herself to be able to be stronger than what a man who doesn’t even try is just naturally. Which is something that personally infuriates me, and something that I think a lot of gendered violence comes down to.
It has a rawness and a realness to it. But the first time Bernie read my draft of that scene, he said “That is the first time I’ve ever read something of yours where I felt it was just you talking, not your character.” And that isn’t good; that is something I’ve been avoiding my whole writing career. I had to really work to make it feel like it wasn’t just me the author grinding the action to a halt to soapbox. Even though I do believe it’s something that makes sense for the Mrs. Hawking character, it had to really feel like her voice, like something she’d talk about in that moment. That’s why personal significance in subject matter isn’t enough. It has to be in the service of creating people who are more real, not less.
So until very recently, I observed a firm rule to never put too much of my own personality into my work. Let me be very clear what I mean by that— obviously all artistic work comes from the self of the artist, in a way all art is self-portraiture. But I believe that really good stories come from empathy and imagination. So I never wanted anyone to read anything of mine and feel like I wasn’t creating fully-realized characters with their own identities and voices, just me speaking for myself through them. I think that’s the mark of an immature artist who lacks the ability to put themselves in anyone else’s shoes. For this reason, I had a rule that no character I wouldn’t make any character that could be seen to be too much “like me.”
I broke that rule with Leah Lucchesi, the main character of Dream Machine. For an experiment, and following Tina Fey’s lead in my inspiration for the piece 30 Rock, I allowed her to be a pretty direct self-insert. Though I have kept her to be as unflattering a representation as possible to keep it from being self-serving, exaggerating all my own worst qualities to make her difficult, self-centered, and boy-crazy beyond even my own levels.
That means there is SOME stuff about her that is personal; Leah, too, likes Marvel actors, finds showering to be work, and thinks writing is the hardest job in the world, but it tends to the superficial. I’ve only alluded to actual meaningful things about me with her, such as how she’s uncomfortable when she feels out of control, and her fear that if she weren’t attractive nobody would give her a chance. I’ll probably do more with that eventually, but so far it’s been only the lightest touch.
The personal moment I’d like to focus on is from Mrs. Hawking part VI: Fallen Women— a moment that was actually personal to a fault. In one of the darkest Mrs. Hawking scenes ever, our hero confesses the physical violence in her marriage. With no constructive way to vent her rage and frustration, she would hit the Colonel in an effort to provoke him into fighting her back. She indicates it was a perverse attempt to prove to him that she could beat him in a fight, which would have risked exposing her secret and endangering all her work.
That part, thankfully, is not the personal part. But she explains her anger at how hard she has to work in order to be physically dangerous when you’re a woman— particularly in comparison to men. She talks about how a woman has to completely transform herself to be able to be stronger than what a man who doesn’t even try is just naturally. Which is something that personally infuriates me, and something that I think a lot of gendered violence comes down to.
It has a rawness and a realness to it. But the first time Bernie read my draft of that scene, he said “That is the first time I’ve ever read something of yours where I felt it was just you talking, not your character.” And that isn’t good; that is something I’ve been avoiding my whole writing career. I had to really work to make it feel like it wasn’t just me the author grinding the action to a halt to soapbox. Even though I do believe it’s something that makes sense for the Mrs. Hawking character, it had to really feel like her voice, like something she’d talk about in that moment. That’s why personal significance in subject matter isn’t enough. It has to be in the service of creating people who are more real, not less.
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