As a result of my novel, Ile d'Or, published this spring (May, 2010), I have heard from people across Canada and the U.S. who either grew up in the north or are familiar with it.
One man wrote that when his family moved into the log bungalow that had belonged to the local policeman, there was a jail in the back yard. It was a shed with bars. I asked what his family had used it for and he told me it was used as a shed. Why not? The fact that it was once a jail simply adds to the legends that surround the frontier town that Bourlamaque (Val d'Or) then was.
A woman wrote to ask why I'd used the name Serge Bikadoroff. In this case, I had used the name of a real person I knew to be deceased. And as the fictional character of a fictional character, it seemed innocuous. Ultimately it was, but I worried until the woman, who turned out to be Serge's sister, wrote to say she'd been delighted with my response to her query.
People appropriate the characters and their stories and tell me what really happened. Or what they would like to have happen. That's their prerogative. Once a book is published, it no longer belongs entirely to the author.
As a result of the novel, I am now in communication with people I had almost forgotten. With one man I exchange photographs and recipes. Another sent the class photographs in an earlier post. There have also been some uncomfortable moments when someone or other thinks the fiction is fact. I explain that it's a novel, that characters are often composites, that a lot of the background of the town is real but that the story is not. The story of four characters who come together in the town in their forties and have to face themselves and their pasts. It could have happened, but it didn't. And at this point, I can scarcely recall what is fact and what is fiction. That's the way it goes for a writer!!
Since we've already talked about these responses to your work, I'd like to speak of another matter: euphemisms. I realise that to speak of someone as "deceased" is thought to be more polite than to say they have died, but I prefer calling a spade a spade. Thus I was pleased by a recent obit in the G & M where - clearly in accordance with the wishes of the woman who had died - she was said to have died, and then, in brackets, "not passed away!" I have told my own children I'll rise from my grave if they put such a phrase in the paper about me. I understand that the use of the word "deceased" may well be out of deference to the feelings of the sister of the man whose name you used in the novel. That raises what for me is an interesting question: to what extent is what one writes influenced by concern for the sensibilities of one's readers? Not an easy question to answer, I think. I know in something I wrote some years ago now I left out material which I thought would interest readers, but which my interlocutors wanted left out. Of course writing fiction is different, but still such concerns are part of that, I believe, and not easily resolved.
ReplyDeleteI think when someone died almost 20 years ago it's a spade to say he/she is deceased. I don't use the terminology passed away either. However, I think if that's what people are comfortable with, that's where they are. I won't have passed on or away when I die either or in my obit, will just be plain dead. For practical purposes. I might have some beliefs at a spiritual level, yet to be explored thereafter!
ReplyDeleteYour comment on the comments on your recent novel brought a smile. I have begun writing down some thoughts and have sometimes stopped to wonder: "Will such and such a person think I am writing about them?" I know I am not but often lives and experiences overlap even among strangers. I sometimes am reading a work of fiction and something jumps out at me because I have had a similar experience or know someone who has. Your insight is a teaching tool for those who would be writers and I so agree that our charcters are composites, composites that live both in reality and in the imagination.
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