"The first piece you write that your family hates means you found your voice, I warn my classes. If you want to be popular with your parents and siblings, try cookbooks."

While Literature used to mean subtly alluding to anything racy, we're now in the age of Real Housewives on toilets, of Lifetime Movie fiction, but most of all, of the overshare. Rather than channeling our observations of humanity into novels or short stories, we're now expected to tell the truth, the whole truth, with bonus courage points for any loved ones we take down along the way. (See also Susan Shapiro's interventions in the comments to her essay. The personal is the personal.)

And I think that's a shame. There are so many advantages to telling "your" story - the one, or ones, only you could tell - through a genre that doesn't promise truth. Fiction of course varies tremendously in terms of how closely it mirrors lived experience. But once you've labeled a document "fiction," the premise changes. Maybe these are the author's experiences and grievances, or maybe the author heard/read about something like this, or maybe it's pure invention (as much as such a thing is possible). I have trouble articulating exactly why fiction is the way to go, but my impression is that it's the route to bigger truths than the ones you can arrive at trying to adhere to your own precise experiences.

This is an issue I've been thinking about for some time. Even in high school, when "creative-writing" class brings about what are clearly individual's own life situations verbatim, whatever the characters are called, I was never able to write "fiction" about myself. Part of it was that doing so led to the obvious writing trap of, there are all these details I would know, and would assume a reader would as well, but how on earth could anyone other than me know what I was talking about? (To give a theoretical example not from my own life: say your protagonist's parents had a bitter divorce, which you take for granted because you are the protagonist, but which could well be information the reader needs but lacks.) Inventing characters forces you to paint the full picture, to tell as much as is necessary. It also just didn't seem interesting - I know that my own life interests me insofar as I'm experiencing it, a likely universal human experience, one that makes all of us biased when telling our own stories. Point being, even apart from whichever ethical qualms keep me from going the dirty-laundry route, I'd also find it more difficult to write about my own personal life, in a way that could possibly be of interest to anyone other than myself.

And yet, this blog. Sometimes I worry that all this blogging - first-person, but not confessional - has damaged my capacity to write fiction. Blogging, but also Facebook, an online presence in general. I know, a huge loss for world literature, but bear with me. Like every other literature grad student since forever, I'm always starting a novel, conceiving of pieces of one. But I fear that I've become so accustomed to writing only from my own perspective, to presenting myself, to adhering to the truth, to keeping everything safe for an audience I can only assume includes the full gamut of family, social, and professional connections, that I'd be incapable of shutting the self-censoring impulse. Even when talking about made-up situations and characters. Because fiction or not, it still comes from my brain, my keyboard. Because I'm so used to thinking of my writing-voice as me, it seems scandalous to write about a character thinking/doing something that isn't something I would admit to thinking/doing (whether or not I have!) on-blog. And I don't even necessarily mean scandalous topics. I mean anything that would cross the line.