Finding Freedom in Fiction Writing
I have always been a nonfiction writer. At least, that’s how I would have described myself until recently. Forget that I have both written and directed plays, see the world in scenes, have a very good ear for dialogue, and depend on a visual memory. I am someone who has spent more than 30 years writing articles as well as books to interrogate the criminal legal system. My meat and potatoes have always been what my college students call “the truth.”
(6 Types of Personal Essays for Writers to Try.)
It’s no surprise then, considering how rigid the book business is in defining genre, that I would have defined myself categorically. You write fiction or you write nonfiction. If you write fiction, it’s horror or romance or upmarket or whatever pigeon-hole someone suggests you plug yourself into. (I have often wondered: If you don’t write literary fiction, does that mean you write poorly?) With nonfiction, you write to inform, educate, or persuade; i.e., you write to get someone to think something and the dependence on reality rather than on creativity seems key to this definition.
Let me also say: A publisher once told me that BOOK A was too academic to be published by a trade press. So I shopped BOOK A to an academic press, which dumped me after a year and a half when a new director of the press decided that BOOK A wasn’t academic enough. A trade press finally published BOOK A. When I told the trade press that I was considering writing short stories, they said they’d never publish them because I had no reputation as a fiction writer.
This is not news, but it has a lot to do with why people often stay in their lanes. And it says a lot about how the business of books influences the writing of books.
I think it is crucial for writers to follow their own muse. Not that we shouldn’t be influenced by agents and publishers; of course we should. But to find what is inside our hearts and heads is the only way to write. I never planned to say, “I write fiction,” but when I sat down to write about a public parole hearing I attended, what came out wasn’t what I expected.
In Massachusetts where I live, the public is allowed to attend Parole Board hearings for those with parole-eligible life sentences. This is not true in all states across the country, but because one of the topics I write about is parole, I have been to at least 50 hearings.
This particular parole hearing sent me to the page as soon as I stepped into my house. The mother of the perpetrator stood up in the middle of the hearing and asked forgiveness from the mother of the man her son had killed. It stunned the board into silence. I tried to write this first on my blog.
It never happens… Families of both the victim and the murderer reached out to each other with sobs of remorse and vows of forgiveness. Mothers, fathers, cousins, siblings—all were refusing to be bound by shame and hatred. For those of us who witnessed this, it was a moment of grace and an example of why restorative justice was created.
It wasn’t bad, but it was about the occurrence, around the occurrence, but not inside the occurrence. It didn’t get to some deeper truth that I wanted to capture. It focused on the idea, and that is valid, but I sensed I had more to say. I was drawn to those two women, amazed that they had done what the Parole Board could not: create a space of forgiveness so the person seeking parole might move on.
Funny that it is fiction that can sometimes capture the deeper truth.
Somehow I moved from my nonfiction mindset when I started thinking about those mothers. I conjured up the prisoner’s mother in her home, picturing her earlier in the day before she came to the parole hearing. In that conjuring, my dramatic imagination took off. I saw her standing in front of a mirror, trying on a hat:
Louis Johnson’s mother wore a red cloche hat to the Parole Board hearing that April. She had struggled with the color, telling herself no, it wasn’t blood red, more like persimmon, a color that called up tropical sun and the bliss of her last vacation with Robert…. She tilted the soft fabric, first to the right, then to the left, uncertain. Everything these days took so much energy.
The hat took me inside Marie. I am not saying props are the key, although a good prop can give a writer many words. No, it was unleashing the imagination and the freedom that comes with doing so, that spurred me on.
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As Joan Didion says, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking…what I see and what it means.” And so I wrote, having no idea where I was going. It was the image that guided me, allowing Marie to emerge.
Marie rummaged through the right drawer of her dressing table, searching for a hatpin. Almost immediately, she saw the yellowed newsprint. The article had been unbearable to read when she first found it that Tuesday morning.
Suddenly she was reading old newspaper clippings about her son, her son in prison for 15 years.
It is hard to say if the idea popped into my head first or if, staying in the moment, I just followed her lead, and as writers so often say, “She led me.” But I do know for certain I felt free to make up what she was reading, where she worked, how she might feel before the hearing, and what had happened with her husband through the years. It did help that I had been to those 50 parole hearings. It did help that I had met many mothers when I taught writing and theater for 10 years at Framingham Women’s Prison. And yet, what came to me was unexpected.
“James is not to blame,” Louis had said, in a voice that was new to her. “It doesn’t matter that James accused me of stealing his bike or of slacking on my part of our business. It doesn’t matter that James yelled or threatened me. None of that matters. What matters is that I shot him. I killed James Stanton. It was my misguided anger.”
“Oh God,” Marie had thought to herself, “What did we do to make him so angry? What did I do?”
It wasn’t hard to be in Marie’s shoes, as Atticus Finch says one must be, in order to truly understand a person. I felt how panicky she had been to go into the nondescript building where she faced her son in handcuffs and waist chains. I felt her hope in that moment when she faced the family her son had hurt so deeply.
I’d never worked for the MBTA. I know nothing about being married to a firefighter. But many of the details in the story came to me simply because I allowed them to. Immersing myself in those details allowed me the freedom to move beyond the facts.
But still, here I am writing an essay, telling the story of how that came to be. To inform, persuade, and educate.
The idea that one is a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer is a false choice. One should not have to choose. I think a subject gives us our style and stories demand their particular ways of being told.
Recently, I had the honor of meeting the real-life son of Marie, the man whose parole hearing I went to. He is now free, living his life like the rest of us, going to work, taking care of his family, trying to help youth like he once was to become self-sufficient and make better choices than he did. When I told him that one of the stories in my collection, Motherlove, is about his mother, I also said, “It really isn’t about her at all, so don’t be surprised.”
And yet, when he read that story, I was relieved that it resonated emotionally with him.
I could never have written Motherlove without making things up. But the truth in our stories comes from the emotional world of the characters we create. For me, that’s the mothers, women whose lives I’ve experienced as well as imagined. Perhaps the best way to describe why fiction is freeing is that it allows us to inhabit the characters and thus to tell the truth.
Check out Jean Trounstine’s Motherlove here: