Fear of Fiction

I wrote before that I might write on this. Now I have, but I don't think I'm done. There's too much still that I haven't dug up.

Reading Maus makes me want to write about fiction. You see, fiction frightens me.

I fear the criticism it might engender.
I fear running out of ideas.
I fear not being interesting enough.
I fear writing stilted dialogue.
But most of all, I fear truth.

In Part I of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, finds and reads a short comic Art wrote about his mother’s suicide. For me, the suspense of reading that short comic before discovering Vladek’s response, of seeing how personal and critical that comic is, this suspense wore my nerves down to nubs.

Here would be a good place to point out that I don’t deal well with suspense. I cannot bear to watch any sitcom whose plot revolves around the inevitable revelation of someone’s deception. Just sitting there, knowing that Joey has been lying all along, and dreading the moment--because it will come--that Monica catches him in his lie. I’d rather change the channel, thank you.

Of course, the moment doesn’t always come in real life. For Art Spiegelman, it came when his father read a comic that Art never expected him to even know existed. Vladek’s response could hardly have been better: “It’s good you got it outside your system” (Spiegelman 104). But one could easily imagine a world in which Vladek did not find the comic, but in which the possibility that he find it dangles constantly, Damocles-style, over Art’s head.

And this is what I fear. What if I create something so personal, so critical, so true, that I stand suspenseful, every day, nervously glancing up to make sure that the possibility of a certain person reading it has not yet crashed down on me.

But wait, you say. Fiction is all about lies. So what truth is there to fear in it? And perhaps, yes, the things that happen in fiction are lies, and perhaps even the people are made up. Fiction is not about what happened, though, at least not the fiction I would like to write. Fiction is about how things are, and what people are like, and why we do the things we do. It may not have happened, but it must be believable.

I know that I’m making insanely gross over-generalizations here. ‘Fiction’ simply encompasses far too much for the things I say to hold true across the board. By ‘fiction,’ I actually mean, ‘the fiction I like to read, because that would be the fiction I would want to write.’ Certainly, I could write unbelievable and wildly popular romance novels if I desperately wanted to stuff my bank account, but I’m not that poor yet. Even then, I wouldn’t want to be writing them, I’d simply want to sell them. So ‘fiction,’ in this essay’s context, refers to something fictional I would be proud to have written for reasons entirely internal to the work itself.

Having worked out this definition, I don’t think I’ll ever write such a book. It frightens me. I can imagine, but only by straining and wincing, creating a portrait as raw and true as that of Vladek Spiegelman. In fact, the obvious thing to write after reading Maus is a portrait of one’s father. I can’t do that. I cannot submit someone so close and dear to me to such scrutiny.

I tend to forgive, to overlook one’s faults. I always go for the benefit of the doubt. I would make the worst cop, because I would believe every criminal that says she’s innocent. I am not naive. I am simply willing to make mistakes if it means the world I live in is a pretty good place.

Case in point: with that confession, I’ve hardly admitted a deep dark secret. And the confession itself is something of a gloss. At times, I try for forgiveness and fail. I am mean, and convince myself it was necessary. When I’m not avoiding thinking about the faults in others and myself, I’m focusing on them, bringing them into such sharp relief in my mind that all other thoughts fade away. But then, eventually, I find something shiny to distract me, and the world is a pretty good place again.

This is the other side of my fear of writing fiction. On the one hand, I do not want to write something so true that it offends my loved ones. I could give a hoot about strangers. Even if I overcame this aspect of the fear, however, I would have to contend with the fear of deliberately sending my mind into a dark place that it usually works overtime to avoid.

If best-selling romance novels are a field of flowers and butterflies, then fiction is the abandoned well at the field’s edge, with a thin voice screaming out of it to be rescued. I’d like to think of myself as a rescuer, but honestly, truthfully, painfully I am but a bystander.

Even this essay, non-fiction, uncritical of others, this doesn’t quite feel right. What matters? Art Spiegelman worries about portraying his father “like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew.” This worry is much bigger than any I can have about the few words I’ve written here. Nonetheless, I will borrow Spiegelman’s defense, and write “I’m just trying to portray [my fear] accurately!” (Spiegelman 132). Whether or not that fear matters to you, I can tell myself that at least I’ve done it a little bit of justice.