Guest Post by Tatjana Soli: First Novels & Autobiography

Popular assumption is that most first novels are autobiographical so I find there is a double-take when I tell people I’ve written a novel, The Lotus Eaters, about a female photojournalist during the Vietnam war, and no, I’m not an ex-photojournalist, and I was only a small girl during the war. So I’ve been talking and writing a lot during the weeks leading up to publication about what my reasons were for writing the book. I will talk about my personal reasons later, but right now I’d like to ask, “Why that expectation?”

Years ago I was at a writers’ function, which I’ll not name, and a person, who I’ll also not name, told a group of aspiring writers that a writer can’t possibly write about someone of another race. I found this statement stunning, and it provided long hours of alcohol-infused discussions among our group. Race is always a loaded issue, so let’s change it to sex, at least as great a leap, I’d say. Should Flaubert not have written Madame Bovary? Should Tolstoy have shied away from telling the story of the adulterous Anna Karenina? In most novels there is a huge cast of characters and very few novels are about a group of identical characters, who are clones of the author. But I’d go farther and say that this kind of thinking really obliterates fiction, reducing it to autobiography, because isn’t it an act of equal hubris that I can know the interior life of another middle-class, American woman just because I am one. In fact, isn’t self-knowledge one of the most elusive things of all?

I’ve always disliked that old writing chestnut handed out to beginning writers: write what you know. Instead, I tell my students that they should write what they’d like to know. Write what they want to spend years discovering. Maybe that happens to be material close to home, close to one’s own experience. But maybe they have a burning desire to write about Marco Polo’s voyages. The only criteria is excellence — if you can pull it off, you own it.

So what were the reasons that led me to write my book? I’ll assure you it wasn’t the idea of appealing to an easy demographic. I was told repeatedly that this was men’s territory, and that men wanted to read about combat. But I had already read excellent books that covered that subject matter. I believed in Toni Morrison’s advice: “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” When I discovered that a few women photojournalists had covered the war, I wanted to tell the story of a woman who finds her destiny, her freedom, ironically, within the terrors of war. What does it mean to lay one’s life down in order to bear witness? And what are the repercussions? And by not being a soldier, this woman has a chance to discover who the Vietnamese were. What did they think of this war?

Mentally I had prepared myself for the possibility that this might be one of those first novels destined for an eternity in the desk drawer. After many years of struggle, it seems like the book was “suddenly” picked up and published. For all the difficulty and struggle, I’m proud that this particular story is my first novel, and my case proves that if you work really hard, someone might take a chance on you. If you are deciding on what to write for a first novel, my advice is to write what you would be sorry not to have written. Risk it, because there is no guarantee of success in this business, but there is satisfaction in being true to your own vision, autobiographical or not. And if you decide to write that book on Marco Polo, drop me a copy — that’s a book I’d love to read.

Guest Post by Tatjana Soli: Our Relationship to Our Stories

First, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m TatjanaSoli, and my debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, is coming out on March 30. It still feels kind of unreal, as well as nerve-wracking, going through the publication process, and I’ve found myself going back to fundamentals in my writing these last months to ground myself. I’d like to share some of these ideas with you this week. I’d also like to thank Aggie, who was so kind to invite me to post here.

A few weeks ago I had the strange, out-of-body experience of attending the performances of a number of my own short stories read by a group of professional actors. Being shy, I assumed this was going to be a tough week of self-consciousness, but once the actors began reading I felt transported from creator to spectator. I was totally caught up in the stories, and I didn’t feel responsible for them. I was listening for the “What comes next?” along with the audience. And I noticed things in my work that I had never been aware of before, such as that there is lots of food in my work. We got so hungry during rehearsal we ran out for a big dinner afterwards. My characters are looking for love and finding it in odd places. They mostly have a black sense of humor and worry inordinately about paying the bills.

Thing is, one of these stories was written over ten years ago. Others were newer, but none were within the last year. But they seemed eerily current with the me of today — oddly prophetic of my life, or at least my interior life now. They were like palm readings that I could compare to the future they described, while at the time of writing them, I felt I was totally using my imagination, writing nothing in the least autobiographical.

I have spoken to other writers who also recognize this sense of déjà vu with their earlier work, a clear pattern of themes and obsessions where none was intended. It is almost as though we were fated to write these stories, or similar ones, no matter what our outward intentions. When my writing students ask me about style — should they consciously pattern themselves on someone they admire? — I say yes, but only if they want their goal is to be a watered down, derivative version of someone else. If the admired work is good, it’s alive with a sense of that author; copied work, impersonated work, is by nature dead. I assure students that if they keep writing, with a sincere effort to tell their story — or stories, because this is a process that lasts over years — their own style, voice, will emerge as surely as a unique fingerprint.

Writers will recognize that this is very like the process of writing a story. One has a character perform actions, which move the story ahead. If one picks random actions, ones not rooted in who that character is, the story will start to move in a false direction. Sometimes this is a hundred page wrong way. This is one of the most frequent reasons a story runs into a dead end. Rewriting is largely a process of recalibrating two things: (1) Knowing your characters more and more thoroughly, and (2) having their actions be the only possible ones they could perform. In other words, you are creating that same sense of inevitability I felt when I saw that a random group of my stories were actually unified because they came from a single vision. Be true to your storytelling self, and ten years from now, you, too, might find out you are a kind of fortuneteller.


http://redroom.com/author/tatjana-soli