Oscar Pistorius Won't Ruin My Day

It's snowing outside and it looks like I'm inside one of those shake-up globes with the white stuff coming down. Or is it falling up? Hard to tell sometimes. Why we love winter, the sense of unreality we get, the upside-downness. Is that even a word? When it's snowing, the whole world comes to a stop. No getting around it. But it all depends. Perception is everything in this wintery world, and this fact -  the dominant role perception plays in everything we think and do -  could be a tragedy, or a great benefit. You're stuck, the snow's coming down, you have to stop and look at things in a fresh way, and sometimes life seems empty, not as good as it could be, the green-eyed monster of envy is staring back at you from that Facebook post, just got a rejection letter from a job application, and, like a car going off the road, before you know it, you're mired in depression and negativity.

More and more I find that much of life comes down to the theory of relativity. It all depends on the vantage point of the observer. Even more, this vantage point is also relative to the internal condition that the observer is under, which is a changeable condition. And the internal condition of an observer is subject to what exactly? What is it that flips the switch so the life energy is flowing one way or the other? Does anyone know for sure? No, because we don't know how the brain functions, or even what it is at its deepest levels. Sometimes our mood is a conscious decision, but sometimes it isn't. And that's when you get stuck, when the decision as to point of view remains unconscious and out of the realm of executive functioning.

I just read a great blog post about how to remember your dreams. The trick is to keep your eyes closed when you first awake and try to carry one thing, one image from the dream with you as you come into the waking world. The same thing could be applied to those days when we wake up and it seems that the world is crashing down in hopelessness. Bladerunner has massacred his beautiful girlfriend. The Pope is resigning because of a secret report detailing blackmail and gay sex rings in the Vatican. Nobody and nothing on earth is as it seems. It's clear as the nose on the end of your face that everything is pointless and there's no redeemable feature to your life at all. Okay, relax. It's one of those days. You've reached a point in your life when you recognize there's an ebb and a flow to things and a closer look is always a good idea. Try to remember one detail, one image from before, when you were still in the world of the positive. Maybe the sight of your daughter working on a drawing at the kitchen table, perhaps an idea you had for an upcoming vacation. Something small and trivial that seemed like a message, a wake up call. There is good. The trick is to put yourself in a positive cycle and remember that nothing is set in stone. The landscape of winter is the landscape of dreams. It depends how you look at it.

Wicked Sick, Jen Smith Riffs on Non-fiction and Perception

Today we have a new author in the second installment of the series The Virtual Writing Scene: Everywhere and Nowhere. Jen Smith is the author of Sick, a memoir of addiction and recovery,  blogging about truth and perception from a writer's point of view. Here she is, Jen Smith, with links down below to her blog and website.  

Is Truth in Non-Fiction Really Just Perception?

What is truth?  Is truth a fact?  I can look at my car and say there are four tires.  That is a fact.  I can look at my car and say it’s red.  That is a fact.  Or is it?  Another person could look at my car and say that it is burgundy.  Is burgundy red?  Some would say yes and some would say no.  So then, what is the true color of my car? 

Truth really is a grey area.  Recently I attended a writer’s workshop at Grub Street Boston about breaking the rules in non-fiction and a great discussion formed around this topic.  At one point the instructor gave us an example of an author that took the liberty to change the number of heart attacks that happened during a particular time, in a particular state, and also the name of a bar in a journalistic piece.  The author’s reasoning was that the number four sounded better than eight and Bucket of Blood, as a bar name, was cooler than the actual name of the bar.

Interestingly there was a student in the class that was fine with the number change but thought changing the name of the bar was outright wrong.  I felt the opposite.  Changing the name of the bar was fine to me but changing a statistical number was appalling to me.  I found our contradicting views fascinating.  Neither one of us was right nor wrong, we just had different perspectives based on our experiences with the world.

As the author of a memoir, SICK, I write about the memories of my past.  I do this to the best of my ability but in all honestly my memory is not the greatest especially when it comes to the time frame of events.  Sometimes I’m not sure if an event happened before or after another event so I have to make my best guess.  There is also the matter of perception.  I’m well aware that I may perceive a past event very differently than someone else that was there.  Does that mean one of us is wrong and one of us is right?  The reality is that probably both of us are wrong and perceive the past event based on our personal views and experiences.  That’s usually how it works in my opinion.

So is what I’m writing not the truth?  I don’t think so.  It’s my truth, my perception of the world as I understand it.  We have a genre called creative non-fiction.  This is when writers take true events and makes them more interesting by adding detail and dialog that may not necessarily be true or accurate.  I get this.  Then there’s the controversy over Jeff Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces that he originally claimed was a memoir but later came clean that the book contained fictionalized events.  If you look at this from a business perspective, Frey couldn’t get representation when he tried to sell the book as fiction.  Non-fiction is where it’s at now, it’s what sells.  So Frey changed his tune and said his book was a memoir and got on Oprah and sold millions of copies.  I’m not saying what he did was right but I definitely get it.

What do you think?  Is there such thing as truth? Is non-fiction merely one person’s perception of the world?  Is creative non-fiction ok?

 

Jen Smith SICK Blog

http://jensmithsick.com/

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http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007A3RE4A

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