Something they don’t already know

I like leaving myself little notes. There’s one stuck to the back of my front door that says: “Amy, are you forgetting your laptop?”

I’m thinking of adding notes below it asking about the whereabouts of my keys,  BlackBerry, iPod, yoga mat — maybe even my shoes.

There’s a note on my desk at work that isn’t so much about forgetfulness. It’s written on the back of a crumpled business card, and it’s about trying a little harder than you have to.

It’s about telling better stories.

Tell them something they don't already know.

Where they write: a photo collection

Bookies have a nosy fascination with the people who write their favorite stories. Think back to your college English classes. Think about how much time was devoted to discussing whose wife was crazy, who lived in squalor and isolation, who was gay.

Think back to those discussions that always came off sounding like whispered pieces of gossip. “Well, you know. He was most likely impotent.”

What we know of the person behind the story changes how we read it. We look for pieces of the writer, clues about why they wrote something and what it might have meant to them.

I hit the jackpot a few days ago when I ran across a photo project titled “Where I Write.”

The project, by photographer Kyle Cassidy, documents the environments in which science fiction writers work — their offices, desks and libraries.

Kyle Cassidy's portrait of Michael Swanwick's office.

The project documents the work spaces of writers such as Samuel Delany, Margaret Weis, Michael Swanwick and Tom Purdom. Cassidy’s photos are personal, revealing and intimate without coming across as invasive or staged.

This is from his Web site: “I spend a lot of time thinking about people’s environments — the places they build around themselves, the things they choose to live with… I started to wonder if there was a connection between the places that writers work and their work itself.”

Find out more about “Where I Write” by clicking  here.

‘What does that river mean to you?’

Looking for symbolism outside of books and songs can be dangerous. It makes people squint their eyes at you. It makes you wonder if maybe you read too much, if maybe you’re too detached from reality.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this since covering a massive flood earlier this year, an assignment that meant spending two days about an hour south of Seattle, wading through flooded yards and slipping down muddy hills.

Copyright by Tabitha Fletcher.

Excessive rain meant the rivers were rising. They jumped their banks and flooded roads, businesses, yards and homes. The rivers turned against land and everything on it, gobbling up miles of road and halting the day-to-day routines of thousands of people.

I don’t think it’s unusual to look for meaning in natural disasters or otherwise upsetting events out of our control. For me, that usually means looking for the kind of meaning you’d find in Hemingway or Fitzgerald, though I know events and objects can’t be analyzed and labeled so clearly when they don’t play out on a piece of paper.

But I put things on paper for a living — at least, on an electronic version of paper. So I can’t help looking for patterns, for symbols. For meaning.

The river was rising. The river brought muddy destruction, not clarity. The river wiped out bridges, ruined houses, carried away cars.

I remember driving along the bank of a swollen river near Tacoma one night as black rain fell on my windshield. I couldn’t help thinking about human pride, punishment and redemption. The images kept scrolling through my mind, culled from Bible verses and Norman Maclean stories.

And maybe that’s why I asked what I did the next afternoon while standing ankle deep in mud along the side of a highway, talking to the owner of a house that sat half under water about ten yards away.

Hitting the back button on Dylan

I picked up a nasty habit from my father: hitting the back button. I listen to songs or albums over and over again, for an entire commute, an entire day, occasionally even weeks at a time.

My dad does this too. Neither of us are very popular on road trips.

Dylan

I’ve been looping through Bob Dylan’s “Desire” lately. The album, released in 1976 and coauthored by the psychoanalyst Jacques Levy, is widely considered Dylan’s most controversial experiment with so-called story songs. It contains 11-minutes of “Joey” about gangster Joey Gallo. But it might be best known for a song about the trial of middleweight boxer Rubin Carver, called “Hurricane” in the ring.

“Hurricane” gets most of my attention, most of the back-button taps. The eight-minute song chronicles a 1966 killing spree that led to the trial of Carver, who was released more than twenty years after his arrest but never exonerated. Dylan felt Carver was innocent, framed by crooked cops. The song says as much.

The legal threats ensued. But that’s another story for another time.

Controversies aside, the song is a notable example of how one form of storytelling can influence another. Dylan struggled at first to write the song, so he and Levy adopted a cinematic approach to the topic. The result is a chronological account of Carver’s arrest and trial, combining both factual and inferred details.

Like something from a film noir picture, the song opens at the crime scene, with real-life witness Patricia Valentine discovering the victims:

Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night.
Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall.
She sees the bartender in a pool of blood,
Cries out, “My God, they killed them all!”

The song moves immediately to a repeated refrain that plays out almost like movie credits:

Deconstructing the no-no list

I’ve long maintained an ever-growing list of what not to do when writing. I call it Amy’s no-no list, and it’s added to by every teacher, every editor, every favorite author.

I first became conscious of the list in high school when a an English teacher told me that first-person writing was weak writing, and that any writer using “yous” and “Is” was in dire need of stronger legs to stand on. “Don’t be a first-person egomaniac. Check,” I secretly wrote on Amy’s no-no list. (I obviously discarded that rule at some point, if that gives you some idea of where this is going.)

That was my sophomore year of high school. The very next year I was introduced to the biggest no-no list of all: “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk and E.B. White. That writer’s Bible was required reading for a British literature class, prescribed by a teacher who always seemed to be out of place without a Renaissance-fair dress — maybe because we read a lot of Chaucer, or maybe because her pale eyes and windswept hairstyle made her look like a creature born several centuries too late.

She patiently explained to me what it meant to write in the passive voice, and I added that to the list. And she held up the slim, gray book and told us all to read it carefully, then to read it again.

For a decade, I walked the line. I said was is — not what isn’t. I omitted needless words. I kept related words together. And I tried to stick to Strunk and White’s no-opinions-allowed approach to style.

Their advice was flawless, reinforced by the advice of college professors and editors. I have little doubt that I’ll adhere to those rules for the rest of my life. Most of the time.

Vonnegut

You see, my faith in the no-no list took a few hits. The first blow came when I read this troubling rule by the late Kurt Vonnegut: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

I was shaken to my core. How could my irreproachable Mr. Vonnegut write such a thing? Semicolons were the glue that held my writing together; I was once teased for using seven in a three-paragraph email to my staff at the college newspaper. I regretfully accepted that my revered Mr. Vonnegut most likely had a point, and that I was probably sprinkling my favorite jar of punctuation on a bit too liberally. I added to the list: “Don’t use wonderful, wonderful semicolons. Well, at least don’t use them often. And never, ever when Kurt Vonnegut is looking.”

About the project: What this blog isn’t

The Truth and Fiction Project is a blog about storytelling.

I’ve used the term “project” for a reason. This blog chronicles my personal quest to understand an ancient art that gave birth to modern creative endeavors such as journalism, fiction, lyrical music, and film. I’m not a literature professor, and I’m not an authority on the history of communication. I’m just a plain-old-everyday journalist who came to the realization some time ago that her job made more sense (and became more meaningful) when she put on her storyteller hat and left all other preconceptions about her profession back in the newsroom with the Associated Press style guides and cold cups of bad coffee.

Once that epiphany circled three times and settled in for the long haul, I began to see stories everywhere — on the radio, in phone calls from relatives, even once on the back of a shampoo bottle.

Storytelling is the heart of how we communicate with each other, from casual dinner conversation to the most elaborate works of fiction. At its best, storytelling teaches us to understand the plight of others and gives us hope that our own contributions to progress won’t be forgotten when we’re gone. It’s the soul of music and poetry, the backbone of faith and religion, the context in which we place history. It’s the machine that drives change and enables human aspiration.

Which stories we tell and how we tell them — these are details that unmask truths about who we are as individuals and as societies.

I started the project to aid my development as a storyteller. If someone else out there in this great online abyss gleans some meaning or enjoyment from it, I’ll be pleased. And I’ll be pretty-pleased if that person takes a minute to chime in with his or her thoughts on the blog’s comment forum.