Imagination vs. Experience

[tocryabout]

This discussion on Responsibility and Compassion in Fiction Writing produced an interesting comment:

It's like the story of Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman working on Marathon Man, when Hoffman spent two days not sleeping to look properly exhausted, and Olivier said to him, "just try acting, it's easier."

This is an argument against the Method, really, is what I'm saying, and in the end, what we are doing is writing, not feeling... [emphasis mine]

I think this is mainly a dispute between two different approaches to writing, which are probably equally useful, just as Method acting is only...well, a method.

First of all (and obviously), feeling alone is not enough. Writing with only raw emotion leads to a lack of perspective, proportion, and (most important) justice. Writing without a really impartial sense of justice leads to flat characters, wish-fulfillment plots, melodrama, agitprop, shrillness, and all sorts of other horrors. In fact, I think writing without justice is the leading cause of Mary Sues: we refuse to see the world from other people's perspectives, other characters' perspectives, and the result is a self-absorbed fantasy who hijacks the story.

By 'justice' I don't mean 'a desire for justice', which is just another emotion. I mean something more like honesty, humility, or even distance. Justice, to me, means stepping outside of yourself and attempting to see if there are other facts out there that your own passions have blinded you to. People can't be entirely objective, but they can try, and I think we owe other people that much. Justice means recognising that you and your opinions are not the centre of the universe. This is one of those cases where a moral virtue is absolutely necessary to good art, in my opinion.

If you read C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, you'll see someone struggling to observe his own reactions with discipline. Lewis carefully avoids and deconstructs the clichés of grief, and turns a cold eye on his feelings and desires. But despite this emotional scepticism, it's an incredibly moving book, because his refusal to spout the sentimental clichés means he gets to the bottom of his feelings, the true core of them.

However, what we are doing is writing, not feeling doesn't seem quite accurate to me either. We are feeling, or at least I am. I'm not even sure I see how a writer could "imagine" a reaction without feeling it herself. No, you aren't cursed to constantly reproduce parts of your own autobiography and never write something you haven't experienced, but the emotions of our characters are still our own emotions, just as an opera singer who does Tosca, Aida, and Eurydice is using the same voice for all of them.

(I've probably misunderstood the original author here; this is the sort of discussion where everyone talks past each other.)

Here's the only way I know of to "imagine" a reaction: my father, of course, has never been kidnapped. But he suffered a severe stroke about ten years ago, and has had a number of medical crises since then, and I've had to get used to the idea that I am helpless to protect him, and he is helpless to save himself, and I love him and he could die. I imagine that the way I felt when he was in the hospital and we didn't know what would happen is probably similar to the way a son would feel when he doesn't know where his father is or if he's okay. I feel by analogy, and it requires personal experience of some kind -- just not necessarily the same kind.

One more note: I have a lot of dreams where someone in my family dies suddenly. I freak out in the dream, and wake up crying, genuinely upset. Sometimes I have to call home to make sure it wasn't a premonition. (I'm dumb that way.) These dreams are real to me while they're happening, so in effect, I have had the experience of being truly shocked and frightened by the death of someone close to me. BUT -- and this is a big but -- these dreams do not go any further than the initial revelation. I don't dream that I'm living the other stages of grief, only that terrible first moment of drowning abandonment. Living without someone is harder to imagine. I think that's the difference between imagination and real experience. I can imagine the emotional pyrotechnics, sure, but reality provides insights that I wouldn't expect. And truth is stranger than fiction.

Comments

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Word. Even IF you're writing about the fantastic, or about someone in circumstances completely different from yours, how can you write about them without that emotional connect?