April 2006“I think there is a deep shame, a humiliation, in being a novelist. Deep inside us crouches a man on a ragged carpet, and the real world rides by.”—John FowlesFrom The Journals, Volume 1948-1965It’s a thought I’ve had myself, if not in quite such dramatic terms, a thought that has recently been reinforced by seeing the film Capote.The film fascinated me on every level . . . and repelled me. I both understood and was deeply disgusted by Truman Capote’s complete self involvement and by the way he used his subjects, even lying to them to get what he wanted, what he had to have for his story. As though the story mattered more than the human beings it was drawn from.And yet, I found myself asking, aren’t all writers guilty of using everyone around us to create our small worlds of words?Years ago I heard the novelist Harry Mark Petrakas speak at a writers’ conference. He told about being with his father when his father was dying, about lifting this man, who had once been enormous but whom he could now hold easily in his arms, and carrying him from his bed to a chair. He gazed at the shrunken figure, a grieving son, but, inevitably, unavoidably, a writer, too. And the writer found himself taking careful note of the papery crumple of skin, the press of bone, the eggplant stain of the eyelids. He was both fascinated and shamed by his fascination. But he was a writer, so his mind went on recording.I have made it a solemn rule of my writing life never to draw my stories from my children’s lives. When she was about eleven, my daughter, Beth-Alison, used to beg me to write about her. “Mom,” she would say, “write a story about me. You could call it Heavens to Elisabeth.” And I would answer, “I can’t write about you. I don’t know you well enough.” I knew Beth-Alison about as well as any mother can know a young daughter, but I knew her, inevitably, from the outside. If I had tried to write about her, I would have invested her not with her own but with my insides, and the result would have been simultaneously an invasion and a forgery.The truth is—even as we borrow whole from everyone we know to spin our stories—we writers have nothing to create out of but our own substance. Writing, especially writing fiction, is an ultimate act of self involvement, a turning inward while purporting to show the world its own face.Now that he cannot read my words, does not know that I am writing about him, I write about my son. Yet I know with every word I set down that am writing, not about Peter, but about myself, my pain, my loss. About a season of my life increasingly identified with loss.In my more assured moments I am certain—and I tell my student writers this—that if we write truly, spinning our words out of our own sinew, we will touch something that others will recognize as theirs. Writing so intimately about ourselves is, strangely enough, the only way our words will ever impact anyone else.It was the way Truman Capote found himself in the killer that made In Cold Blood historic.I wonder sometimes, sitting in the carefully manufactured serenity of my study, if I have given up too much of the world to be credible. When John Fowles speaks of crouching “on a ragged carpet” while “the real world rides by,” I cannot help but flinch.I think I’ll leave my work behind today and go play with baby Chester.