The Authorial Imagination

A month or so ago, I was talking with a girl I know, Sarah, who stays with my mother a couple of days a week. During the conversation among the three of us, the fact that when I was a child I had a pet dog called Rosie came up. The conversation turned to fiction – my mother opined that I should start writing stories again. I said that I didn't currently have any ideas for stories. Sarah said, "Why don't you write about Rosie?"

If I have, among my readers, any authors or anyone who knows something about fiction writing, this anecdote may make them cringe. Sarah is lovely but like almost everyone who doesn't write, she is stupid about authors –  ordinary people assume that writers write autobiographically, that fiction is 'self-expression'. I had a pet dog called Rosie who I was fond of and so I should write about her. The truth is that there is a gap between fiction and its writer's life. Authors write about problems that they observe in the world around them, they write about conflict, and, most importantly, they make stuff up. This should be obvious but to people who don't write and don't read much, it isn't.

Authors, and I include screen-writers among this coterie, want most of all simply to write a good story. An author will be trucking through life and an idea will occur to him or her – it may be inspired by something that happens in his or her life, it may be something that he or she reads in the newspaper, it may be inspired by something that happens to a friend. It may be that he or she is thinking about something abstract, a philosophical or psychological issue, and wants to try to express this abstract idea concretely through characters, locales, and actions. From this idea, a story grows. In fact, both Stephen King and Stephen Donaldson have said that the genesis of a story is the collision between two different ideas. Donaldson had the an idea for a man plucked from the real world and put into a fantasy world in which he is unable to believe. But the story didn't get going until this idea collided with a second idea– that this protagonist should be a leper. Lincoln in the Bardo quite obviously also grew from a collision between two ideas – the author's fascination with the idea of an intervening stage between death and rebirth as described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead and his fascination with Abraham Lincoln. The two germinal ideas behind every story may sometimes be easily identified, and may at other times be very difficult to identify indeed.

The obvious truth that authors make stuff up, or, to put in another way, draw from material outside their own lives, is simple to demonstrate. Bret Easton Ellis wrote American Psycho even though he wasn't a serial killer. David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest even though he wasn't a drug addict. Nabokov wrote Lolita even though he wasn't a paedophile. Obviously Tolkien wasn't a hobbit and had no experience of orcs and elves. Donaldson wrote The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant even though he wasn't a leper. David Lynch wrote and directed Mulholland Drive even though he isn't a lesbian; Annie Proux wrote Brokeback Mountain even though she isn't a gay man. The novel Trespass by Rose Tremain, which I'm reading at the moment, features a gay man, his lesbian sister, and a woman driven partly insane by childhood sexual abuse. I am sure Tremain herself is none of those things. What happens, obviously, is that a story idea occurs to an author and then the author explores the idea and draws it to its logical conclusion.

Of course, aside from fantasy works, stories require a real-world backdrop. My godmother wrote a novel called Waiting for Elizabeth set in Renaissance-era Ireland; before and during her writing of it she carried out extensive research into the time and place it was set. Proust and Flaubert both sought to realistically depict the culture and society of respectively mid and late nineteenth century France. Darkness at Noon is intended to be a believable depiction of the mock-trials that occurred in Stalinist Russia. Although Donaldson isn't a leper, his father worked with lepers, and so Donaldson understood this disease. Of course, autobiographical material does creep in – authors write best when they write about what they know. Stephen King features alcoholic protagonists in several of his works, such as The Shining and The Tommyknockers, I am sure because he battled with alcoholism himself. Often, such as in The Shining, Misery and The Dark Half his protagonists are themselves authors. Frame's Faces in The Water could only have been written by someone who had spent time in a mental asylum as a patient. Joyce's "The Dead" was inspired by Joyce's own reaction to a disclosure by his wife that she'd passionately loved another man before she'd met Joyce – however, Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of the story, is in no way a self portrait (in fact, I think Joyce disliked Gabriel). The point I am making is that it takes a skilled reader, perhaps even a reader who has written fiction him- or herself, to distinguish the autobiographical from the purely fictional in a novel, film, or story, written by someone else.

I think all of the stories I have written have resulted from a collision between two ideas. The gay spy film I wrote emerged from the juxtaposition of John Le Carre type spy stories and the games played in the homosexual underworld, a world I knew nothing about but had heard of. Bruce Sells Out grew from a collision between the idea of a misanthropic, failing comedian who befriends the devil, and the idea of a rocky relationship between a man and a woman. (In this film Bruce accidentally kills his girlfriend at plot point 2 and sells his soul to bring her back to life at the film's end. I have discussed this film in the post "Bruce Sells Out".) The story "A Refusal to Mourn" (included in this blog) also grew from two ideas: the idea of a youthful adventure recollected in adulthood, and the idea of a seduction and casual sex. (This is a bad summation of the story. You can read the actual story by looking up the post "A Refusal to Mourn".)

I think the fundamental reason for the 'illness' I have experienced is people's reactions to some of the screenplays I have written. The gay spy film was pure invention but I think people decided it was autobiographical. The film "The Hounds of Heaven", by contrast, was an accurate depiction of a girl I knew but I think people thought I had made it up and had done a bad job presenting the main character, Jess. In fact, although many people didn't know this when I wrote it, "The Hounds of Heaven" is a roman a clef and is largely an accurate picture of a real person. I'll list briefly some of the details in the film that were in fact true. The real Jess did keep an enormous poster of Syd Barrett on her wall. She did study neuroscience. She did have a jacket she wore because she thought it could magically ward of other people's thoughts. She did go through a period of not brushing her teeth because she thought someone was putting poison in her toothpaste. On one occasion when I was with her,  when putting on makeup she justified it by saying, "the male gaze and all that" (an utterance that only makes sense if you know something about feminist film theory); I put this in the film. She did have an obsession with Nietzsche – in fact, in late 2011 the real girl had a quote from Nietzsche tattooed somewhere on some part of her body. Many aspects of the film were inventions. Rick is almost entirely fictional and the real girl's father is a lawyer rather than a civil engineer – I made him a civil engineer to provide an excuse for him taking her to Christchurch in March 2011. One of the mistakes I made is that I allowed people to think that Jess was intended as a 'typical' schizophrenic when in fact there is no such thing as a typical schizophrenic. I was describing a real person, but a person so unusual readers couldn't believe she was real.

There is a link between creativity and mental illness. Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and David Foster Wallace all killed themselves. Van Gogh famously cut of his ear and sent it to a prostitute. However, the link is not simple or intuitively obvious. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals deal with 'abnormal psychology' as though normalcy is easily identifiable and unproblematic, as if there is such a thing as a normal person. Often creativity itself is seen as a sign of abnormality, of mental illness. I met a patient once, new to the service, who told us that she had written a sci-fi film in which great clouds of methamphetamine descend on the citizenry – I suspect that, even though she wasn't fully conscious of this fact, even though it was just an intuition that she had which she was trying to express, her illness may have in some way resulted from this film she wrote. The people treating her may even have decided she was a meth addict because of it. (I know this seems unlikely but, trust me, psychiatrists are stupid.) I also suspect it possible that a cause of this illness that the real Jess suffered may have had something to do with something she wrote, perhaps a poem that others misinterpreted.

I found it quite difficult writing this post. There may be mistakes (solecisms?) in it that I have overlooked. Since the increase in my dosage and my change of psychiatrist, I feel often as though there is no point in fighting, that it is impossible to escape, that I am trapped forever by other people's errors. It has taken me days to muster up the motivation to finish this post – I originally intended to say more about the authorial imagination but I have forgotten what I intended to say. In the next post, however, if I can summon up the will to write it, I want to add to the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia" and explain finally the nature of my illness – supposing that people have not already worked it out from what I have already said. I can't save myself. Somehow, someone else has to save me. But I don't know anyone willing to.