The Making Of, Part 3: This Is Not Your Diary

I can write about anything.

I'm not saying I can write well about anything, but I can write about anything, and usually at great length.  If it's something I like, then I can write a lot.  And if it's something I know?  I can write forever and ever.

When I decided that I would write "Pray" in the first person, and frame it with the story of the writing of the story, I dove into it with somewhat reckless abandon.  That is to say, I wrote about every little thing in my life and every little thing in the lives of my family.

The problem, of course, is that not all of that was relevant.

I could go into a ridiculous, pretentious discussion here about writing and how even writers who delve into the extremes of fiction are ultimately writing from a place of non-fiction, and how, as has been claimed, writers lie to tell the truth.  Like I said, I can write about anything and I could go on and on about that.

Suffice to say that there's something inherently confessional about writing, not matter what it is you're writing about.  And once you start down that road, it's hard to stop.  Even worse, suddenly every little thing in your life becomes fodder for the book, and soon you're adding symbolism to things that really aren't symbolic of anything.

Symbolism can be a horrible thing because it's so easy to abuse.  It's also really easy to use as justification for pretty much anything.  So over the course of a few hundred pages, I started filling the book with all sorts of crazy anecdotes about my life.

I spent pages writing about my first car.  Sure, my grandfather gave me that car (which he'd inherited from his mother), but did it have anything to do, really, with his military service or his relationship with my grandmother?  Not even remotely.  And yet I rambled on and on about it.

I received a note in red ink from Nicole that simply said "All this about a car??"

Needless to say, the section on my 1972 Ford Pinto (brown, no less) was substantially cut down.

It can be hard for even the best of us to know where that line is, the line between what is pertinent and what is fluff, between what should be shared and what should be kept secret, between fiction and non-fiction.  But blurring those lines is where I hang my hat, it's just sometimes hard to know when to stop.

Strangely enough, it applies to this blog, too.

Oh, and the book is entirely non-fiction, in case anyone had any doubts after that nicely pace, yet oddly phrased sentence up there.  Everything in it is pertinent, too.  I may have crossed the line on what should be shared, though...