I would like to use what little bully pulpit this blog
affords me to ask my fellow writers to please, please stop engaging in the
literary equivalent of the Mommy Wars, in which people who choose to write
fiction and people who choose to write nonfiction defend that choice by
attacking those who have made a different choice. Every writer does not have to
choose one genre and one genre only to read and write (any more than every mother
only works outside the home or is a stay-at-home mother, and never moves between
those statuses). More importantly, though, the Genre Wars perpetuate the same
facile assumptions about each genre that they are meant to dispel.
When someone says something stupid to you like, “I don’t
have time for fiction; I only bother with things that are true,” or “Nonfiction
must be easy to write, because you just put down what happened,” the correct
response is not to bash the genre which it sounds like the person prefers, but
to point out patiently (and quickly, because these folks often have short
attention spans and aren’t really interested in reading anyway) that in fact
all writers deal in imagination and the truth. Sometimes – and it pains me to
say this, but it happens – your own fellow writers will make such claims,
although I have found it is usually in an attempt to defend their own little
corner of the literary realm. Don’t tell me about how great fiction is, one CNF
devotee sniffed in a Facebook comment, why should I care about your imaginary
friends? The response here should be the same, although given with greater
urgency: whatever the genre, we all rely upon imagination and seek truths that
we render through the medium of language.
Fiction writers, please bring me your imaginary friends,
rendered as carefully and powerfully as you can manage. Elizabeth Bennett,
Faith in a Tree, The Monster, Gregor Samsa – I have loved them all, and always
welcome the chance to make more imaginary friends over whom I can laugh and cry
and wonder and complain, and in the end feel changed, or at least less alone in
my human messiness. Nonfiction writers, you too, please bring me your mother, your
great-grandfather, the guy on the shrimp trawler, yourself on the Appalachian
Trail, yourself in recovery, yourself learning how to roller skate at age 52 –
because when you render these on the page for me, your reader, they become my
imaginary friends too, as real and necessary and challenging for me as any
fictional character, and, no, that is not an insult. It is the way of things
for all of us, no matter what genre we choose to write: imagination and the
truth are the twin stars to guide us, and bring writer and reader alike to
whatever destination the words carry us.
