Story and the Past: When the Fictional Story is True
February 12, 2010
Here’s the awkward truth–awkward, as so much truth is: I was nervous about the five little words my editor suggested adding to the marketing description of my first novel. Her voice was all enthusiasm over the line–but then she gets jazzed by everything, everything, I tell you, from character development to comma placement, which is why writers adore her.
“What if we added,” she wanted to know, “the words ‘Inspired By a True Story’–what do you think? Because that’s true, right? And people would love to know the story behind the story. Right?”
Well, yes. Sure. Exactly. Sort of.
Because certainly Blue Hole would never have been written without the Appalachian Mountains.
Or the brutal 1980 shootings on 9th Street in Chattanooga, or a cross-burning at the home of a Sri Lankan family in my hometown, Signal Mountain, Tennessee, or my friendship with the daughter of that family.
It wouldn’t have been written if I hadn’t loved my little Southern town, and boasted to the friends around me as an adult in Boston that my mountain was home to some of the kindest people ever to draw breath.
And it never would have been written if I hadn’t also been knocked-flat horrified as an adult living in Boston to learn that my hometown had also been beloved by the assassin Byron DeLaBeckwith. After he’d been acquitted by an all-white jury twice in Mississippi for the murder of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, Ku Klux Klan member DeLaBeckwith apparently found our pretty mountaintop a safe, comfortable haven during the years I was growing up there. So all that was true.
But regarding this truth thing, I’d had fear struck into me when my brother–who is, okay, yes, at least a rough model for the protagonist’s brother Emerson–read an early draft of the novel and proudly pronounced, “Yep, I can pick out the real person behind every character.”
“What? No, see, this is fiction,” I was desperate to explain–like he might’ve gone muzzy on the definition of fiction.
True, all fiction writers draw on real life, of course. We borrow a dimple here, a balding head there, our own ugly experience of betrayal and forgiveness and deceit.
But the last thing I wanted was old friends of my brother’s and mine drawing lines from each character to an actual person–suggesting sometimes a not very flattering portrait that was never intended as a portrait at all. The characters in the novel came, perhaps, from what Jung calls the “collective unconscious,” a mish-mash of conglomeration and imagination. But in the end the characters were fictional creations, and while the story was based on historical events, it, too, was fictionalized. It wasn’t a strictly accurate rendering of events–and wasn’t supposed to be.
Still, the key words “Inspired By” convinced us all the tag was fair to use with the book.
Now here’s what’s been so intriguing to me about a fictional story rooted in Truth–that is, the truth that human beings are horrifically prone to finding others to despise in order to feel themselves superior. And that the stories of these hates are all around us, some covered up, some blazing away in full view. And that human beings also have access to improbable grace. To forgiveness. To change.
Since Blue Hole Back Home was published nearly two years ago, I regularly hear from people who’ve read the book, then give me the gift of their own stories. Sometimes these are people who grew up thousands of miles from where I did, but something in the novel triggers tales of similar hate–and reconciliation–they’ve seen and lived out. Sometimes it’s people from my own hometown telling what they remember of events that few of us talked about at the time.
One story-giver was a cameraman who’d been sent to interview me, a guy about my own age who’d grown up near where I had, but raised in a whole different part of town. Now both in our forties, one of us black and one of us white, we spun out stories together, his filling holes in what I’d known or seen or remembered–his having personally known, for example, the five African-American women described in my story as being critically injured by drunken white guys–two of them let off entirely by the jury, the third serving only a handful of months. He was the one who finished that thread of the truth for me: all five women died without one penny’s compensation.
Just this week, I received a letter from a man in a maximum security prison who grew up in a valley not far from my mountain. He’d just read Blue Hole, and wrote to tell me how he remembered much of what I described in the novel, and how his father had taken him as a boy to a Klan rally at a nearby elementary school (an elementary school! Dear God). And how he was heartbroken now by the cruelty and senseless of the racism that brewed in those days, long after the height of the Civil Rights era. His words, written from prison by a white man who committed I have no idea what kind of serious crime, spoke of gladhearted change. In our culture. In himself. A story in trade for a story.
So I’m thankful today for stories. For the way they get us offering up our own little peepholes on Life and on Meaning: our stories –some of which we rightly call fiction. But when they speak from the gut and the heart, they can also be terribly, painfully, startlingly True.
If you want to hear more of the actual events that inspired–note that key word INSPIRED–the novel Blue Hole Back Home, check out this television interview with Channel 12 in Chattanooga.
Or view the YouTube video below:
Story and Inspiration-And Especially Self-Discipline
February 12, 2010
I feel today like posting a long list of quotes that hammers away at the need for the writer to be self-disciplined? Because I need to hear them again myself. Often. I mean really often. And with a threat implied.
Why is that when any of us watch an Olympic athlete–as many of us are doing lots of these days–we’re not the least bit startled to learn that the skier or snowboarder spends an eight-hour day in training. Of course, we nod–that’s why they’re so darn good. Yet we beat up on ourselves if we can’t plop down, cold and unpracticed, and pound out a brilliant, suspenseful first draft of that novel we’ve always wanted to write?
Before I’d had a first book accepted, or even completed, back when writing was something I knew I wanted to do, something I talked a lot about but honestly didn’t do much of, someone quoted G.K.Chesterton to me. The first step in becoming a writer, Chesteron said, though I’m paraphrasing, is applying the seat of one’s pants to the seat of one’s chair.
Ouch. No mystical descriptions of inspiration or first drafts dropping like manna from heaven.
Just sitting down. Today. And tomorrow. And every day. With no guarantees how all this work will turn out in the end. With no assurance that anyone anywhere will ever want to read today’s work, or tomorrow’s.
But with gratitude, still, for the trying. Always gratitude.
On Inspiration–and What If Doesn’t Come?
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
–Jack London
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time…The wait is simply too long.
–Leonard Bernstein
To draw, you must close your eyes and sing
–Pablo Picasso
Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.
–Emily Dickinson
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect
–G. K. Chesterton
…And On Perseverance
You keep putting one blessed word after another, just as you hear them, as they come to you.
–Anne Lamott
After ecstasy, washday
–Zen saying
If people knew how hard I worked to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
–Michelangelo
Blue Hole Meets YouTube
February 12, 2010
Listen to an excerpt from the first chapter of the award-winning novel Blue Hole Back Home
Compassion and the Arts–Join the Conversation!
February 11, 2010
This blog entry is similar to the Compassion and the Arts button on the web site’s main page.
Here on this blog, though, you can leave your own comments and insights. And we hope you will!
If you’re working in some area of the arts yourself–writing, music, film, painting, photography, dance, theater–or you’re close to someone who is, you know that this profession can often feel awfully detached from the real world of real suffering.
Living in Nashville, I’m particularly aware of the music industry, and what a superb job many individual bands and musicianshave done in publicly supporting a particular cause, whether clean water or feeding the hungry or construction in developing nations.
And from personal friendships with people in the arts, I’m aware that many of you give to compassion organizations–often quietly, often with breathtaking generosity.
Still, lots of us struggle with what can feel like an inhumane disconnect between barricading ourselves in a studio or library or practice room to work all alone–while the images of recent earthquakes or tsunamis, or of orphanages without nearly enough food for their children play on in our heads.
What I’d like to do here is simply offer a place for a conversation among people in the arts.
We don’t have to agree on one organization or one region of the world to support.
We don’t have to agree on political parties, or live in the same country.
We don’t have to be celebrity artists with hosts of fans just waiting for us to mobilize them.
But perhaps it would be helpful to talk. Maybe to give one another ideas: Do a certain percentage or your royalties or ticket sales, for example, go to a certain micro-enterprise project? Does your work tie in directly with compassion issues you care about? Do you have one specific organization with whom you partner? How do you stay informed and connected with poverty and hunger and suffering?
Perhaps we’d form a loose coalition of writers and musicians and actors and painters and directors and sculptors who want to live with passion and compassion, not only in the stories we tell or the images we produce, but also in how we direct our money and attention.
If you’re interested, join the conversation here on this blog. Or forward this to your own colleagues and friends. Your input will be valued. And let’s see what comes of the conversation….
Thank you for your time, your ideas and your heart.
(Thanks to Habitat for Humanity for use of the photo taken in Haiti, just following the January 2010 earthquake.)
Giveaways for February/March: the Luck of the Irish to You!
February 11, 2010
Enter the Drawing for a Free Book
before St. Patrick’s Day!
We regularly give away signed copies of Joy’s books, and you’ve come to the right place to enter.
The next drawing will take place on St. Patrick’s Day. So, the luck of the Irish to you!
The winner will have his or her choice of the two books below:
A collection of stories, poems and essays from various seasons of women’s lives, GRIT & GRACE was described by The Chicago Tribune as: “Written with much heart and wit, this little gem of a book touches on the ordinary and profound experiences that make up a woman’s life . . . a poignant and satisfying collection . . . funny and sad, inspiring and awfully surprising.”
OR
Winner of the 2009 Christy Award for First Novel
Chosen as the 2009 Common Book for Baylor University
“Funny and beautifully crafted” –Leif Enger, bestselling author of Peace Like a River
For more information on Blue Hole Back Home, please see Joy Jordan-Lake’s website under Books-Fiction in the menu bar and under the main page feature article at bottom left
To be including in the drawing, just leave your name and a brief comment–a one-line hello is fine–on this blog.
If you’re part of an academic or community group, book club, or other organization that might consider using one of Joy’s books for discussion, please let us know.
If your name is drawn, we’ll contact you to request a mailing address for the free book. All names not drawn will be automatically entered in the next drawing.
And a Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you!
Story and Music–the Songs behind Blue Hole Back Home
February 7, 2010
As my musician buddies would be quick to remind me, music tells its own story–whether or not it involves lyrics. Often, we writers owe a great debt to the stories in the music we listen to during the weeks or months or years that our own stories are coming to life–or not–on the page.
In the case of Blue Hole Back Home, a coming-of-age tale of teenagers living in the still-racially and ethnically fractured South, I’d already included a good bit of music in the book by the final draft. But in the final weeks before the galley stages, my husband came home from the library with a CD of an 1960-70s compilation of Atlantic Records hits, including R&B standards like Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” That got me digging out old R&B favorites, just for fun. And, okay, also just because in the final stages of a book I become frantic for any distraction or excuse not to write. A peculiar thing happened, though: the songs began finding their way into the plot.
Below is Ben E. King singing “Stand By Me,” which figures significantly into the final chapters when The Pack is coming face to face with senseless cruelty, and what it means to stick by a friend, no matter the cost.
That same week, a friend of my son’s was staying with us for a few days and brought with him an Earth, Wind and Fire CD. I hadn’t heard them for years–or hadn’t paid attention if I had. Suddenly, though, I was finding that the story of Turtle and Emerson and Jimbo and Farsanna Moulavi and the Mangy Pack was all happening with a kind of soundtrack in the background– the most unlikely assortment of music, from James Brown’s “I Feel Good” to gritty, blues versions of “Amazing Grace.” Lots of these songs found their way into the plot.
No story that takes place in the Appalachian Mountains can spin out without the storyteller hearing a good bit of bluegrass along the way–at least in her memory. On the mountain where I grew up, people gathered on Friday nights for “Mountain Opry,” a jam session free-for-all where some of the best banjo pickers and guitars in seven states just show up and play with whoever is there–and the audience passes the hat. In the novel Blue Hole Back Home, Emerson plays a mean bluegrass guitar, but there’s also mention of banjo along the way. Here is Earl Scruggs with Wild and Crazy Guy Steve Martin on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”
And here is Martha and the Vandellas with their “Dancin’ in the Street,” which figures into the plot when The Pack is down in the city on Seventh Street, based loosely on Chattanooga’s former Ninth Street, where five African-American women were critically injured in a 1980 drive-by shooting by three white men.
One of the main characters, Jimbo, typically rides in the back of the pick up where he is teaching himself to play guitar. As they jolt down the old logging trail roads, he thrums out strange medleys of “Stairway to Heaven” and “Holy, Holy, Holy” (try finding that on YouTube). But below is another song Jimbo plays–this one with a few more posted public versions. Here is LeeAnn Rimes with a blues-inspired acapella version of “Amazing Grace.”
When Baylor University in Texas chose Blue Hole as its 2009 Common Book, my teenage daughter kindly bought and burned the songs for me that appear in the book, and I carted the CD to Waco with me to speak. Nervous as I was–okay, catatonic with fear–over having to speak to the 4,000 freshman who’d just read and were about to discuss my novel, I managed to raise one arm to hand the CD to the sound guy, who graciously popped it in as the students were arriving in the big hall.
Music is amazing. By the time Diana Ross had belted out her “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (which figures into the early chapters) and we’d moved on to “Dancin’ in the Streets,” I was forgetting to be nauseous and tongue-tied, and about two minutes away from dancing on the platform’s table with the microphone balanced on my nose.
Here is Diana Ross performing her inimitable “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in 1979, the year in which the novel is set.
May stories–in music and on the written page–inspire you today to offer outrageous forgiveness, to stand by a friend, and to find a good table to dance on.