Catherine: I agree, Gail, that interviewing can be crucial. In my time, I've interviewed: immigration lawyers, a nuclear safety expert, watchers of a rocket launch, NASA brats, Iranian refugees, cartographers ... migraine sufferers, an artist who works with webcams ... However, I've also stumbled up sometimes against the interview I'd love to do but can't, people who won't talk to me, or whom I just can't get access to. For instance, my second novel, The Rules of Engagement, features amongst its characters a rather idealistic passport forger. No passport forgers were available for interview -- funny that! So I took the sideways angle of interviewing an immigration lawyer who had represented passport forgers, and their clients ... While working on my current novel, tentatively titled The Thief, I have come up against people who won't talk or can't ... ... and found myself reading books, and listening to the rhythms of voices on YouTube videos, and burrowing deeper into myself, exploring the internal country of the self ... ... and making things up.
Gail: Funny that we fiction writers would make things up...who would have thunk it! I find, of course, that people assume I've lived a thing (or someone close to me has) even when I do make it up!
Catherine: On this subject, I'm in the midst of reading a very strange novel, or something, it's a hybrid book that actively defies classification: The Dark Back of Time, by Spanish novelist, Javier Marias. Marias wrote a novel called All Souls, set in Oxford, where he himself taught for two years, and describes the experience of having actual people insisting on reading themselves back into the characters in the novel, even when they were only tangentially or in some cases not even the inspiration for said characters. The ability to make things up convincingly, fiction's ultimate route to truth, is one that readers have a difficult time with. It is a kind of magic act (one that doesn't involve wands or anything other than words), and we don't really know what to do with it. I think people find it a little frightening: it's easier in the end to be able to follow a point-to-point path between story and reality, to say, this comes from there, and oh, that's how she knows this.
Gail: And, of course, as I say in an essay on this forum (The Art of Reading) readers are involved in the act of creation of the novel they read. They invent the novel right along with the author, and so of course they take their own experiences, their own memories, and even their own "characters" into the novel with them. So of course they "know" who the character was based on. They put the person in there!
... my approach to writing has often (certainly not always!) been to start with a personal event, something that happened to myself or someone close to me, and then research and interview to, again, enlarge that personal story into the universal, into fiction. The reason for this approach has been that I need that emotional connection to the subject matter to carry me through the many years it will take to finish the project. I can't simply be interested in the subject matter, I must be bonded to it in some way. On the surface at least, the characters in your novels seem quite removed from what I know of your personal life, so I imagine your approach is quite different. But maybe not, as at least on some level our personal experience informs our writing...
Catherine: I would agree, Gail, that fiction has to start in a deeply personal place, though for myself, the stories that I write don't have to be overtly rooted in the events of my life. I draw on deep personal connections to my material, however, on my own obsessions and the journeys that these take me on ... I suppose I go to the more hidden places ... fiction for me is a chance to live out alternate lives, the ones we can't live in the constrained world of actuality. I want my fiction always to be a little larger than life, or stranger than my everyday life: there's always a slight impulse towards exaggeration. As a younger writer, the idea of realism, or what I identified as realism, which had to do with the everyday and the domestic, seemed frighteningly constraining, and in order to write, I had to find a way past my sense that this was the way serious writers wrote, which was what I briefly thought. I didn't want to be Alice Munro, I wanted to be Alice Munro crossed with Kafka! As a child, I was obsessed with the Apollo missions (although I didn't exactly want to be an astronaut) and it was out of this obsession that my first novel Minus Time eventually began to emerge. I've spoken above, of Claire, the mapmaker protagonist of Claire's Head: well, I've always been very spatially oriented, and fascinated by maps. I almost never get lost and memorize places easily, and I wanted to draw on this way of viewing the world in the novel. Also, I do, like Claire and her sister, get migraines, and have a sister who gets them, and was interested in the strangeness of this as the basis for a sibling bond, even though the sisters in the novel are not at all like me and my sister/s. So there's always some deep personal connection to the material. Often I'm as happy for the deep personal connections to remain hidden (the novel's underwear, so to speak). I think of my novels as being deeply personal rather than autobiographical.
Gail: I agree completely. Even the fictions of Alice Munro are, of course, exaggerations. That's the nature of fiction. And though I am often forthright about what initially inspired my novels, I don't think of them as autobiographical. The personal story is only the starting place. What excites me is the journey of discovery as that initial idea (or emotion) moves into fiction. If I'm not surprised by a day of writing, I don't feel that I'm doing my job.
Catherine: This is so true, Gail. And isn't it perhaps true for teaching too? That in a community of like-minded fellows, who believe that the art of fiction is meaningful, that this way of accessing truth, this particular internal journey, is meaningful, also leads to its own moments of discovery. New ways of phrasing things. Or seeing things. New ways of thinking about the art of fiction. This is how I feel myself pushed as a teacher: it's a constant refinement, or journey, of articulation. Also, it's a counterpoint itself to the work, which is so solitary, and requires such reserves of tenacity and faith. I do feel lucky to be spending my life immersed in a way of thinking that I love so much.
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I'll be posting bits of our conversation about teaching fiction on this blog in the upcoming days. For the rest of our conversation, check out the forum at
www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca under Catherine Bush. Also, take a look at Catherine's website at:
www.catherinebush.com
