Autobiography as Destiny

I heard a lecture this summer on the writing of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde before we went off to see the opera in Seattle. The lecturer, to make his point, had some seemingly revealing statements to make about Wagner’s autobiographical connection to this opera.

At the moment that he uttered these rather banal words it struck me how little people really understand what it means to use one’s own material in life to tell stories, to make up stories. Having already been through the myriad recountings of what Scags at 7’s origins were and how I had come upon this story, it slapped me hard across the face when someone else referred to autobiography in a story teller’s life as either just some kind of psychological drama that needs to be worked out or as a fruitful field from which to pluck some ripe fruit.

To me, as a fiction writer primarily, but this idea of fiction applies to my poetry too, I am beginning to see with alarm what our poor understanding of human psychology and the needs of a writer have led us to believe. But more important than that, I see how it may be leading astray some of the less practiced writers to be evaluating their novels, stories and poems and plays as if they either have to strive to stay within the strict family story or recreate it so the relatives will understand what has happened behind closed doors.

Another instance recently where the idea of autobiography came up in discussion was with a friend who was joking about what Abraham may have said to Isaac about the choice of that ram over him. We began talking about family dramas in terms of someone always being sacrificed and then I said what I thought was so obvious–that is what Scags at 7 is about.

One has to choose, as a writer, exactly what story to tell that will convey the ideas that are bugging you and you want to explore in your fiction. It doesn’t come easily, these plots and obstacles and the ways in which the characters have to make decisions and act out the consequences of those decisions.

Writers are handed a set of plots that are as old as humankind. Whether one is drawn to the Bible or to fables and legends or other holy texts, somewhere a set of stories resonates within and we choose. We choose what is to be told, and how to tell it and whether to use the strict structure of those earlier tales or to alter them according to our present needs in retelling the stories.

That is what we are doing. Retelling all that has been said before but finding the way to do that in our distinctive voice. Thus what has happened in our lives is all we have. It will influence all that we write about and how we see the world.

Scags at 18 now grows out of a different tale but it too isn’t original with me nor can it be. I mean how could it be? What I have done and how I interpret the experiences I have had revolve around a set of myths or archetypes or plots or structures–whatever you choose to call it. But in my storyteller’s mind is this notion that the closer I come to seeing the true story I am trying to retell, the better and more clearly I can write the story.

As Scags, the character, enters into a new world where her fears as well as her own ambitions will create the obstacles she must overcome, the choice of the structure/plot is key to having a coherent story that readers can follow and identify with. As she watches the world of the late 1960s unfold, she also is following a set of leaders who are exposing her to the dangers and teachings of a new way of life for her. How she understands what they are leading her into and how she copes with what happens to her and to her friends forms the basis of this story.

Set within the milieu of an East Coast college at the height of the anti-war and civil rights movements, she is drawn into the new era of identity politics, self-awareness and a new set of options about how life can be lived than she would have encountered had she stayed closer to home, tightly wrapped in the bubble of Skokie.

Yes, in a way this is a Wizard of Oz like story. Our heroine goes in search of a magic cure for what is wrong in her life and encounters the world at large. It is bigger and more perplexing than she could have imagined. But that is why journeys are so educational and why they form the basis of most good adventure stories.

Thus Scags’ awakening in this next novel in the series, has to do with her first awareness of who she is in the world and what that says to her and about her.

And it was my autobiography that taught me how to tell this story.