Let’s talk, just for a moment, about social media. I love Facebook and Instagram for the connection they provide, with people I see rarely and with people I see often. I love the unexpected laughs, the bits of beauty or joy, feeling a part of other’s people’s lives. But I am well aware of the gap between what I post about and the reality of my own life, and don’t envy anything I read or see (okay, maybe I get a little jealous sometimes of Paris pics—I’ve never been). Here’s what I post about: My vacations. Family milestones. My work. Small things that bring me joy. Here’s what I don’t post about: The times I’ve lost my temper and sworn at my kids. The times my kids have sworn at me. My back pain. How hard it is to care for my elderly mother. The years of my life I have wasted looking for my glasses. Sometimes I run into a friend I haven’t seen in months and he or she says to me, “Your life is so fun!” And I think, Are you kidding me? Sometimes I think about posting nothing but the truth for an entire month, but I don’t.
Instead, I write novels.
Writing fiction begins where social media ends—with the secrets and failures and mistakes and surprises we don’t share widely in public forums (at least, most of us don’t). This does NOT mean, thank you very much, that fiction is thinly veiled autobiography of our worst moments, although readers and friends and family members often seem to think so. What it means is that good fiction has the emotional truth of our worst moments, the embarrassing or disappointing or surprising impulses we wish we had been strong enough to suppress.
Last Thanksgiving, for example, I posted on Facebook several photos of our lovely and happy Thanksgiving dinner, a table filled with family and friends, the glow of candlelight, the perfect turkey (it was good), a few anecdotes about laughs we had shared. What I did not post about: The “Armageddon” a couple evenings earlier, during which some people who shall remain nameless drank too much, some cried, some threw up, some screamed and slammed doors, some argued bitterly, some cursed, and one even got temporarily lost, barefoot in the middle of the night. I won’t go into my own role in that evening’s series of disasters, other than to say that I said and did things I regret.
I have zero plans to ever write about that evening in my fiction. BUT I can, and will, use the emotions and errors in judgment and missed communications that were part of why that evening unfolded as it did. A million things led to our Thanksgiving Armageddon, a concatenation of things that had nothing, really, to do with the provocation at hand. I’d had a stressful autumn trying to care for people I loved deeply who were suffering deeply; those people weren’t even there that night, but the feelings and thoughts I’d been keeping inside for months were there, and they found their way to the surface. The other people involved had their own secrets and stories.
In writing fiction, I think hard about my characters’ secrets, about the stories they’re not posting on social media, as it were. Sometimes these secrets are a key part of the plot, as in J. Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions, which I’m reading now. Sometimes these secrets aren’t elemental to the plot, but they’re elemental to the character. Sometimes I think about the kind of things my character might post to his or her Facebook page or Instagram, and I think how different those things might be from who the character is, what they really think and feel. I think about whether they’re keeping secrets from other people, or whether they’re keeping secrets from themselves by refusing to look at or acknowledge something that should be seen.
What secrets are your characters hiding? How will they come out?
About Kathleen McCleary
Kathleen McCleary is the author of three novels—House and Home, A Simple Thing, and Leaving Haven—and has worked as a bookseller, bartender, and barista (all great jobs for gathering material for fiction). A Simple Thing (HarperCollins 2012) was nominated for the Library of Virginia Literary Awards. She was a journalist for many years before turning to fiction, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and USA Weekend, as well as HGTV.com, where she was a regular columnist. She taught writing as an adjunct professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and teaches creative writing to kids ages 8-18 as an instructor with Writopia Labs, a non-profit. She also offers college essay coaching (http://thenobleapp.com), because she believes that life is stressful enough and telling stories of any kind should be exciting and fun. When she's not writing or coaching writing, she looks for any excuse to get out into the woods or mountains or onto a lake. She lives in northern Virginia with her husband and two daughters and Jinx the cat.
“good fiction has the emotional truth of our worst moments, the embarrassing or disappointing or surprising impulses we wish we had been strong enough to suppress.”
I couldn’t agree more that one need not reveal their full hand except through the lens of fiction. I relate wholeheartedly on the emotional experience — I have quite a colorful past and have lived through some pretty wild times and seen the not-so-graceful side of human behavior. I’ve made mistakes I regret ahd which I prefer to keep private. I’ve had quite a lot pressed upon me by all these experiences and you bet that comes out in my fiction, often symbollicly or through character experiences that carry the same emotional weight. Way I see it, all the things I’ve learned are rich stories that can help other people, give them hope, or appreciation of how struggle can be overcome; I’m not writing to readers through Facebook, blog, or social media, and unless I’m world famous I have no business writing an autobiography. Fiction is where’s it’s at, and nothing is lost there. I’m 100% on board with sharing the special milestones on social media. It’s not lying — it’s packing your punches for where they count.
Thanks so much for sharing on this great topic!
Kathleen–
For me, the heart of your post are the images of Thanksgiving you posted on social media–thank you, Norman Rockwell–versus the Armageddon night some days earlier. You will use the “emotions, errors in judgment and missed communications” of Armageddon in your fiction, but not the actual details and people involved.
It makes me think of Tolstoy’s pronouncement (I’m paraphrasing) that all happy families are the same, but all unhappy ones are unique. I got lots of photos on Facebook taken at Thanksgiving. All of them had been staged, and they were close to interchangeable. They all really did take their cue from Norman Rockwell and advertising, people feeling obliged to support a vision of American wellbeing.
But the thing is, the Thanksgiving I was part of was exactly the same. Everyone at that once-a-year event felt a sense of obligation to be good company, to be thankful, to be part of one of Tolstoy’s happy families. And there was nothing dishonest or wrong about any of it.
I guess my point is the same as yours. Social media can project a positive, hopeful image, for ourselves and others. And there’s nothing wrong with fiction doing that as well. But to be taken seriously, fiction must do much more. It has to make room at the table for bad manners, selfishness, etc. Because that’s a big part of the novelist’s job description: paying attention to what we’d like to forget.
Thank you for a thought-provoking post.
You’ll love Paris.
In my WIP, my MC is keeping a secret about the girl he loves: She can see the future. Her gift has brought her trouble and death, and could well do so again.
He’s also refusing to see something about himself. He believes that he can understand everything and explain it all. What he will not acknowledge is that some things are beyond his understanding.
Like her.
The first secret is easy to spin into plot. The second is internal and more difficult to turn into story. But that’s the challenge, and one especially good for me to think about today.
Thanksgiving would be unbearable without turkey, wouldn’t it? And gravy. Thanks for today’s gravy. It’s good.
I totally agree with you: What’s on FB and Instagram is not real life, what’s in a good novel is real life. That of course raises another question: if social media presents such a staged, theatrical and fake image of life, why have it at all?
What pleasure is there in exchanging expected and expendable images of Thanksgiving and other events like it? What’s the point? It amounts to massaging one’s ego, setting forth the best possible image about one’s self, a little like adjusting the make-up and grinning “cheese” when a picture is taken. Total waste of time. The person looking at that photo, you can bet on it, doesn’t give a damn.
Yet social media is like make-up for women: We can’t do without it!
But a good novel does make a reader think and ultimately “give a damn” and buy the next novel from that author. An interesting newspaper article likewise. Non-fiction too. And what all these things have in common is this: they wipe off the make-up, they take away the mask, they reveal the truth underneath (whether it is politically correct or not). And that’s invaluable…Not at all like what’s on social media!
Love your post, Kathleen. Taking your emotions from your life and replaying them, recharging them fuels your craft. There isn’t a writer past or present who hasn’t moved from an argument to write down some feelings and later use those notes to grow a sentence, a paragraph an entire scene. There is some honesty in FB photos. But I feel there is more honesty when we take a moment we wish hadn’t happened and distill it, change it until it boils over into our fiction. We are human, after all, and so are our characters.
My wife and I were just talking about this yesterday. I post to social media similar to the way that you do, as does she but, our experiences with what others surrounding us post is quite different. That vile underbelly rears it’s ugly head quite a bit with some. Others adopt a passive aggressive stance by posting things that show their true opinions, their anger and frustration without naming names. Letting it all hang out and airing dirty laundry on line seems to be pretty common.
My own emotional upheaval has made it’s way into my books from time to time but it’s disguised well and ancient history…ten years or more. I dare not write about anything serious that any of these social media hounds in my life could point to as involving them or even just something they may have been feeling recently.
My ideas for story usually start as a deep impulse, image or emotion that I ferret out of hiding and onto the page. I’ve had something pushing at my insides lately, and through blogs, conversations others began, and even a new sketchbook project theme that was presented to me, this idea of secrets or things hidden has been a reoccurring theme for several days. I know what the secret is, and I think it will soon come to light in many of my creative pursuits, and particularly in story. I think I’m looking forward to it, but it’s a little scary to reveal so deeply. Your advice on using the emotion not the real detail is helpful in my approach. Thanks!
Hi, Kathleen:
I’m a big believer in secrets in characterization. I devote an entire chapter to them in THE ART OF CHARACTER. They automatically create the illusion of depth. Give a character a secret, and automatically there is an inside (what is hidden) and an outside (what is revealed). And the bigger the secret, the better the payoff.
I often recommend to students that they identify a secret that, if ever revealed, would change the character’s life and her standing among one or more cherished persons forever.
As for regret, it’s another trait that’s terribly useful in characterization: it can result from something the character has kept a secret as well, but often it isn’t, and is all too public. In either case, it’s something the character cannot undo. She has to live with it forever, with that deep-seated feeling of shame and unease.
Wonderful post. Thanks so much.