Two Truths and a Lie

On characterization + writing that feels realer than real (even if it's fiction) + purposeful destabilization and how it helps us tell the truth at a slant

I have been tucked away this past week on the North Shore of Lake Superior, a place littered with my own memories. I am here by myself, in nearly complete working, working on my novel revision from sunrise to sunset (literally—sun floods my little lakeside condo with brilliant light just after five in the morning, and by the time night falls at nine or so, I am way too exhausted to do much other than check in with my family for a few minutes or play Wordle).

In addition to successfully completing this revision, leaving only polishing for my future self back home, I’ve been rewarded here by a constant view of Lake Superior and, on Saturday night, the strawberry full moon rising over these majestic waters.

But, during the fifteen or so hours a day between dawn and darkness, I am pounding away at my laptop, dreaming up and documenting memories that are not mine. This is my first foray into the world-building of long-form fiction (I’ve written short stories and flash, but never before a novel). It is thrilling. Also incredibly humbling. And exhausting.

One tenet of good fiction has always been that it contains truth. Not that it is true, per se—after all, it’s fiction! But that it draws from something that is true. That element of truth is what makes fiction, no matter whether it is realistic or fabulist, relatable and “feelable” to the reader. Sometimes the “truth” held within fiction has been transferred and reconfigured in such a complex way that it could never be tracked back to a literal source. That kind of truth is bigger than the writer. Bigger than all of us. Sometimes, as with autofiction, the “truth” of the fiction (perhaps in addition to that bigger truth I’ve just described) is also more accessible, nameable, traceable. Sometimes, fiction contains truth as shown through details taken only slightly beyond the point of their original nature. 

All of this, for me, is fascinating to explore. As someone who has spent most of my life writing truth through nonfiction, I find that fiction liberates me to play. To exaggerate. To take things to the extreme. With nonfiction, we start with certain things that actually happened. With fiction, we start with nothing but an idea, and then must play with it. How tantalizing. How exhausting. How informative for our writing practice overall. Truly.

Back to the idea of play.

The writing games I love are many. For example, listening and stealing snippets of dialogue. In fact, just this weekend I played that game, while transcribing and long-distance texting the overheard conversation of three people using the Weber grill outside my screen door. Their conversation was a dramedy about the mystery of charcoal, the internal temperature of meat, and the pros and cons of char (hint: no one likes too much). It was also a study in generosity (“no, really, I’ll eat it, it’s not that bad”), making the best of things (“the good thing is, this is sweet summer corn, so it’s actually fine if it’s raw”), forgiveness (“no, don’t apologize, I mean it, it’s fine!”) and reframing (“this actually worked out really well, you guys, we rocked it”).

And my youngest, Billie Oh (who writes over at Dumpster Yoga), and I like to play a game we call “keep going.” It’s kind of like the concept of “yes, and” in improv: we take an idea, usually something relevant and real to what we are doing in a given moment, and we extend that idea as far as we can. We keep going. Several years ago, playing with the idea of “keep going” led me to my first published flash fiction piece, a dark exploration of motherhood called “Softer.” That story was my first foray into flash, and the beginning of a kind of obsession with the way misogyny, patriarchy, and unrealistically idealistic expectations can play out in ways that hurt mothers, especially here in America, where so much of motherhood occurs in isolation.

This came up again a few summers ago, when Billie and I were together taking care of the grandbabies. It was a baking hot afternoon, the babies were a bit out of sorts, and Billie and I were drenched in sweat and losing a little steam, when suddenly we noticed that at some point, one or the other of us had inadvertently started humming “Jingle Bells.” For hours, the tune had been droning through us both on a strange, absent-minded loop.

This seed idea got us thinking about a character who, in moments of stress or duress, habitually hummed Christmas carols. From there, we kept going. What if instead of just humming carols absent-mindedly, this character hummed compulsively? And what if instead of just carols, she actually had an obsession with Christmas in general? What if she collected those little Santa figurines and decorated year-round? And what if all this started some time in an after that was distinct and changed from a before that would never return for her? What if all this humming and good cheer was a manifestation of complicated grief? Billie and I eventually wrote that story as a weird little flash piece called “She Always Loved Christmas: that’s part of a flash triptych about the dark side of motherhood that we’re getting ready to revise and send out on submission.

In fiction, you can use the “keep going” game to take something real and keep pushing and pushing until it is still real … but changed. In creative nonfiction you can, in fact, do a similar thing with “keep going.” You can use it to dig deeper into a moment—to exaggerate that moment or amplify the feeling or destabilize the feeling, all of which can capture or recapture the reader's attention. 

We’ll be playing a version of this game in today’s writing prompt.

But first, let’s take a look at an example. In his recent story Thursday, George Saunders (one of my literary heroes and a very generous teacher himself) uses a device that gives us an interesting example of pushing things beyond real. In the story, the main character, Gerard, is taking some sort of pill that allows him to travel back into his own memories. Saunders drops us into this memory exploration this way: 

It started, as usual, with a vague feeling of remembering: me, grass, summertime. Then came the youthful Memory Body, gradually occupying the Randomly Recalled Iconic Space: our yard on Plymouth Street, me on my back on the lawn, my sister, Clara, there beside me. Soon, wherever I looked, there it was, that old world, now the one and only world, right down to a robin on a leaning fencepost cocking its head at me, like, Remember me, random robin from your youth? 

Based on the shirt I was wearing (red-white-and-blue peace sign in the center like a bull’s-eye), I was thirteen, Clara ten (those sweet braids). The two of us were sharing, the way we did so often back then, an almost mystical feeling of sibling camaraderie as we lay there trying to discern meaningful shapes in the clouds. Then came the lovely sounds of the old neighborhood: yapping sales patter from a kitchen-window-perched radio; the cars over on Blair, more blatantly mechanical and clank-clank-clank than their contemporary counterparts; distant lawnmowers cross-bellowing like enraged crewcut men in dispute; locusts buzzing from positively everywhere. 

All of it was so familiar, utterly dear.

As the story unfolds, he keeps going. Pushes further, and discovers that the memories were not his own: 

Now that the fog was lifting, I found that, yes, I did have an additional concern, a rather significant one: I had no sister. Never had. I was an only child. I grew up not in a suburban house on “Plymouth Street” but on a farm in northern Minnesota. A wheat farm, a sprawling wheat farm. In a tidy little farmhouse built on a solid slab, i.e., no basement. I had no Uncle Rod, no Aunt Staci. My parents, both only children themselves, were ministers, exceedingly gentle ministers, who framed every picture I drew, incorporated my child-thoughts into their sermons, eschewed alcohol entirely, had never raised a hand to each other. Never had there been the slightest hint of a falling-out between them, or between us, and, in fact, I’d traveled back to Anslip on two occasions to help first Father, then Mother, pass into the next world—experiences, separated by a decade, that I counted among the most profound of my life, during which I had grown even closer to the parent from whom I was parting and ever more grateful to have been a member of that loving, dignified, forthright family.

I recommend reading the full story over at The New Yorker if you can. It’s a wild and brilliant example of building two characters in one. It is also a unique and engaging way to exaggerate a truth that we all feel: the pull of different selves. The slipperiness of truth. The uncertainty and instability of our own understanding of ourselves and the world around us. 

“Thursday” is fiction—and not realist fiction—and Saunders is mining a fabulist premise from the start. But even for strictly nonfiction writers, the “keep going” approach can take your work (and your understanding of yourself) to new places. Deeper places. Truer places.

That’s what we’ll explore in this week’s prompt, in four clear, structured steps that will lead you to a complex character (which might be you or a version of you, or not), and a premise for an essay or story. Feel free to approach this as mostly nonfiction with a fiction slant, or purely fiction. Or maybe try it both ways. Either way, the steps are the same.