http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/everything-is-fiction.html
AUGUST 8, 2012
EVERYTHING IS FICTION
Posted by Keith Ridgway
I don't know how to write. Which is unfortunate, as I
do it for a living. Mind you, I don't know how to live
either. Writers are asked, particularly when we've
got a book coming out, to write about writing. To
give interviews and explain how we did this thing
that we appear to have done. We even teach, as I
have recently, students who want to know how to
approach the peculiar occupation of fiction writing.
I tell them at the beginning—I've got nothing for
you. I don't know. Don't look at me.
I've written six books now, but instead of making it
easier, it has complicated matters to the point of
absurdity. I have no idea what I'm doing. All the
decisions I appear to have made—about plots and
characters and where to start and when to stop—are
not decisions at all. They are compromises. A book is
whittled down from hope, and when I start to cut my
fingers I push it away from me to see what others
make of it. And I wait in terror for the judgements of
those others—judgements that seem, whether positive
or negative, unjust, because they are about something
that I didn't really do. They are about something that
happened to me. It's a little like crawling from a car
crash to be greeted by a panel of strangers holding
up score cards.
Something, obviously, is going on. I manage, every
few years, to generate a book. And of course, there
are things that I know. I know how to wait until the
last minute before putting anything on paper. I mean
the last minute before the thought leaves me forever.
I know how to leave out anything that looks to me—
after a while—forced, deliberate, or fake. I know
that I need to put myself in the story. I don't mean
literally. I mean emotionally. I need to care about
what I'm writing—whether about the characters, or
about what they're getting up to, or about the way
they feel or experience their world. I know that my
job is to create a perspective. And to impose it on the
reader. And I know that in order to do that with any
success at all I must in some mysterious way risk
everything. If I don't break my own heart in the
writing of a book then I know I've done it wrong.
I'm not entirely sure what that means. But I know
what it feels like.
I do no research. Given that I've just written a book
that revolves around two London Met police
detectives, this might seem a little foolhardy. I have
no real idea what detectives do with their days. So I
made some guesses. I suppose that they must
investigate things. I tried to imagine what that might
be like. I've seen the same films and TV shows that
you have. I've read the same sorts of cheap thrillers.
And I know that everything is fiction. Absolutely
everything. Research is its own slow fiction, a process
of reassurance for the author. I don't want
reassurance. I like writing out of confusion, panic, a
sense of everything being perilously close to collapse.
So I try to embrace the fiction of all things.
And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you
tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your
day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out
of a collection of random experiences and events.
Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and
loved ones—they are characters you have created.
And your arguments with them are like meetings
with an editor—please, they beseech you, you
beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of
the way things are, and you impose it on your
memory, and in this way you think, in the same way
that I think, that you are living something that is
describable. When of course, what we actually live,
what we actually experience—with our senses and
our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous
chaos.
So I love hearing from people who have no time for
fiction. Who read only biographies and popular
science. I love hearing about the death of the novel. I
love getting lectures about the triviality of fiction, the
triviality of making things up. As if that wasn't what
all of us do, all day long, all life long. Fiction gives us
everything. It gives us our memories, our
understanding, our insight, our lives. We use it to
invent ourselves and others. We use it to feel change
and sadness and hope and love and to tell each other
about ourselves. And we all, it turns out, know how
to do it.
Related: Read Keith Ridgway's interview with Cressida
Leyshon about his short story "Goo Book," which
appeared in the April 11, 2011, issue of the magazine.
Illustration by Richard McGuire.
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