It changes from being written about. Storytelling alters the storyteller. And a story is altered by being told. A human self is made up of stories. These stories are rooted partly in experience, and partly in fantasy. The power of fiction lies in its capacity to gaze upon this odd circumstance of our existence, to allow us to play with the conundrum that we are making ourselves up as we go along.
Our bodies are complex biological machines. As long as they live, they create a story about themselves in order to function. We call this story the self. We believe in the reality of the story. We believe the story controls the machine. Yet we are constantly reminded that things are not so simple. We do things not in keeping with our stories, sometimes horrible things. Writing is a chance for the stories that are us to come to terms with their innate fiction.
So write what you know. But also know you are being written. Love and death and stuff, but my love, my death, my this, my that. Everybody else is a light character in that play. When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it.
I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers. You should write something that you need to go and learn about.
Make the writing process a learning process for you. And my learning, through the process of the novel, through research and talking to specialists, was really what kept me motivated. Go learn about it—if you want to know about it, probably someone else wants to know about it, and let your learning process be the catalyst for you to take other people on your learning process, through your novel.
All of the stories you mention above came from fragments of things people told me—about pranks on the pager phones in a power plant, for example, or about inheritance in Argentina.
I start with those details, which feel real, and seem promising, and start writing around them. I tend to write what seems like the emotional story between the characters first, and then check the parts I got wrong, and add more details later. You write about murder, and you never killed anybody. The facts you can always find, and other things you can make up. Not long ago, I found the first notes I took for Catch You Later, Traitor, and to my astonishment I realized that in one way or another I worked on this book for eight years, and thought about it for a long time before that.
In , you had to be very cautious about what you talked about. That was bred into me. So that element presented another difficulty for me. We can imagine loss. We empathize, we project, we make much of what might be small experience. After all, a novel if it chooses can cause a reader to experience sensation, emotion, to recognize behaviour that reader may never have seen before.
That commotion may or may not be a response to what we actually did on earth. Which, after all, is pretty much everything.
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Rep Your Practice If you practice, let the people who read your blog know. Copy and paste the code for the button into your sidebar and show off your hard work. Social Instagram Facebook Twitter Pinterest. In theory, they range between -1 and 1, but it is unlikely that you will observe such large values even if you submit a text sample from one of the authors themselves unless you submit a composite of all of their writing. Providing larger samples of text will on average increase the range of observable magnitudes because the resulting estimate of your style will be more reliable.
Genre will likely also have a substantial effect on stylistic similarity. If and when enough responses accrue, I may post a follow-up on the effects of genre on user-submitted writing styles. It's also worth emphasizing that each author's style is aggregated across all of their work. Lewis Carroll, for instance, shows up at the bottom of the graph with great consistency because, in addition to Alice and Wonderland his books on mathematics and logic which contain lots of exotic punctuation are included.
Chaucer suffers from a similar issue because the text of his Canterbury Tales is riddled with asterisks denoting the modern English equivalent of his Middle English. To analyze your style, we made counts of the various "stop words" that you use. Stop words are grammatical, content-free words such as conjunctions and articles. We also counted how frequently you used various punctuation marks.
The code then compared all of these counts to similar sets we measured in advance from a number of famous writers. This comparison consisted of calculating the rank correlation between the frequency-normalized and standardized counts from your writing and those of the famous authors.
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