On being seen

A writer friend and I have been in an interesting dialogue about the private (and public) side of writing.

The topic arose because she's just finished the first draft of a wonderful novel, a coming-of-age story about a girl making the transition between high school and college.  Knowing my friend as well as I do, it is easy to see that she shares some personality traits with her main character.  My friend worries that if people read her novel -- which I hope they will, some day -- readers will become convinced that the story is, at least on some level, autobiographical, and will judge her based on the actions of the character she created.

My reply was that there will be this label that says "Fiction" on the spine of the book, so anyone who doesn't notice that or doesn't know the definition of the word deserves everything they get.  But on a deeper level, her question is a profound one.  Because in some sense, all fiction writing is autobiographical -- or at the very least, deeply self-revealing.

I can say, without exception, that every protagonist I've ever written -- and more than one of the antagonists and minor characters -- is, in some way, me.  You can't write what you don't know, and that extends just as much to characters as it does to setting, time period, and plot.  None of them are intended to actually be me, of course; all of them have traits, quirks, and personal history that is different (for a lot of them, very different) from my own.  But in a real sense, if you want to find out who I am, read my fiction.  Then you'll know me.

This gives a serious spin to my friend's question, because to be read means to be seen, on a fundamental level.  Parts of you are exposed that you may have long kept hidden, and a discerning eye can often see more than you realize.  I've recounted here before how my long-time writing partner, the inimitable Cly Boehs, knew I was bisexual long before I told her.  Direct quote from her -- "You think I didn't know that?  Every story you've written has at least one scene with a sexy bare-chested man."

I was dumbstruck.  I honestly didn't think it was that obvious.  So much for hiding in the shadows.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Marcus Quigmire from Florida, USA, Hiding in the darkness (3443966860), CC BY-SA 2.0]

It's a scary proposition, especially for someone who is as face-to-face shy as I am.  I've already closed my eyes and leapt off that high diving board, of course; my first book was published in 2015, and I've gone on to publish over a dozen more.  But truly, it still terrifies me in a lot of ways, and it's not just getting the inevitable "your writing sucks" reviews that all authors dread; part of it comes from the fact of exposing my soul in public.  There's something about having people read your work that's a little like walking out into the middle of the road, bare-ass naked.

And there's no doubt that it can backfire sometimes.  I still recall, with some pain, when I let a (former) friend read the first three chapters of a work-in-progress, and her critique began with a sneer: "This story is somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck."  How that was supposed to be helpful, I don't know, and in fact with the perspective of time (this incident happened about twenty years ago) I now find myself wondering whether it was supposed to be helpful.  The critic in question was herself an off-again-on-again writer who had never completed a manuscript, and I suspect that the viciousness of the critique had at least something to do with envy.  At the time, however, her response so derailed my confidence that it was years before I actually picked up (and eventually completed) that novel.  (If you're curious, the novel is The Hand of the Hunter -- which is still one of my personal favorites of the stories I've written, and scheduled to be published early in 2022.)

So, in a way, all writing is personal, and all writers have a narcissistic streak.  We wouldn't write about something we didn't care about; our personalities shape our stories, and therefore our stories are reflections of who we are as people.  I pour my heart into what I write, and so, I believe, do most authors.  It is an act of bravery to put what we create out on public display, whether that display is on the level of sending it out to a few friends or publishing it for international purchase.  We are actually selling little portraits of our own spirits, and hoping and praying that the ones who look at them won't say, "Wow, what an ugly picture that is."

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Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The voices of the dead

This week I ran into a couple of claims of a type I'd never heard of before -- and considering how long I've been in the game of analyzing the world of woo-woo, that came as kind of a surprise, especially when I found out that this sort of thing has apparently been going on for a while.

Turns out that there are people out there who say not only that they can contact the spirits of the dead,  but that they are acting as the ghost's locum.  In other words, they are guided by the not-quite-departed spirit to perform acts that the spirit itself would have done, if only it still had a body with which to do so.

Which becomes even more extraordinary when you find out that the ghosts are those of people like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Victor Hugo.

If you're thinking, "Wait... so that means...  No, they can't really be saying that" -- yes, that's exactly what they're saying.  These "mediums" write novels, create art, write music, and then claim that the works came from the minds of the Great Masters, who were just hanging around looking for someone through which to channel talents frustrated by the inconvenience of being dead.

First we have Rosemary Brown, a British housewife who in the 1970s catapulted to fame by going public with the story that she had written music -- or more accurately, written down music -- that had been dictated to her by Debussy, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, and Bach.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some people have been impressed with her work to the extent that it was actually performed and recorded in a collection called A Musical Séance.  Pianist Elene Gusch, who wrote a biography of Brown, said, "It would have been difficult for even a very able and well-trained composer to come up with them all, especially to produce them at the speed with which they came through."

André Previn, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, was less effusive. "If the newfound compositions are genuine," he said, "they would best have been left on the shelf."

Brown died in 2001, still claiming that the pieces she wrote were actually compositions of long-dead composers.  She even described them; Debussy was a "hippie type" who "wore very bizarre clothes," Beethoven no longer had "that crabby look" because he'd regained his hearing, and Schubert tried to sing compositions to her but "he doesn't have a very good voice."

Skeptics, of course, point out that none of Brown's music goes much beyond the simpler and less technical compositions the composers created when they were alive, which is odd, especially since some of them had had hundreds of years to come up with new pieces.  But she's still considered by true believers to be one of the best pieces of spirit survival out there.

Then we've got Brazilian artist Valdelice Da Silva Dias Salum, who makes a similar claim, but about painting -- that when her hand holds the brush, she's being guided by Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Monet, and Van Gogh.  She actually signs her paintings not with her own name, but with the name of the artist who (she says) was doing the actual work.

"I grew up poor and illiterate," Salum told Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, the reporter for NPR who wrote the story.  "I didn't even know who these painters were.  I had no artistic talent.  But the spirits selected me."

Garcia-Navarro included in her story a drawing of a girl that Salum signed "Renoir."  To my admittedly untrained eye, it looks a bit like the attempts high school art students make to copy the style of the grand masters; there's nothing about it that has that luminous beauty that distinguishes a genuine Renoir.

But what do I know?  Apparently when Garcia-Navarro was researching for her story, she also found a writer named Divaldo Franco who is apparently producing new works by Victor Hugo, and another named Sandra Guedes Marques Carneiro, who has sold over 250,000 copies of romances she says are dictated to her from the spirit world by love-starved dead people.

No wonder they need to get their frustrations out.  When Rosemary Brown was on Johnny Carson, she apparently revealed that according to her sources, there was no sex in heaven, which is pretty damned disappointing.

Not that I'd probably be heading there even in the best-case scenario.

My general feeling about all of this is that as evidence for life after death goes, it's pretty thin.  Once again, we have the spirits of the dead communicating to the living things that don't really reveal to us much we didn't already know.  I find Rosemary Brown the most interesting of the lot -- I have to admit that some of her compositions aren't bad.  But there's nothing about them that jumps out at me and says, "Oh, this is definitely J. S. Bach at work."

The upshot is, as a writer, I'm going to continue to work on getting everything I can written while I'm alive.  It'd be nice if after I'm dead I could continue to dream up stories and upload them to the literal Cloud.  But I'm not counting on that opportunity.

So if you'd like to read something I've written (other than Skeptophilia, obviously), there's a selection at the right to choose from, and my next novel, Lock & Key, is scheduled to be on bookshelves in November.  Because once I've gone to my eternal reward (or just deserts, as the case may be), my general impression is that will be that.