Writer's Fallout Shelter

Hmm. I am in a bit of a quandary here. I come from a much different school of writing. To my mind, it is impossible to recreate reality on the written page. The best one can hope for is a close approximation, we call that "history" or sometimes "biography". I could write my own life story, keeping all the names, places and events the same, but my memory is not the most accurate form of recordkeeping available, so even then I would have to do hundreds of hours of research just to insure names, dates and places were accurate, let alone events.

On the other hand, nothing I draft can ever go unrevised. I deeply envy any writer who claims they never need to revise their work. Even "On the Road", by Jack Kerouac really needs a nice thorough revision in order to be enjoyable for me to read. As published, I find the whole work one notch short of complete rubbish, regardless of how "true" it might be.

Therefore, in my writing, I don't bother trying to tell or retell with any accuracy. I do go to great lengths to keep my writing believable, but to actually base a story on my life or the life of someone would be impossible for me. Reality is far too limiting.

Revision is what writing is all about. My suggestion would be don't worry about how much of yourself falls onto the page. You're going to have to go back and rewrite it anyway. Until the revision process begins and you start doing things like developing themes and consolidating metaphors, you can never be sure which piece of the original draft is going to be pure gold and which is going to be pure rubbish. I have often gone back and completely altered the central plot and theme of a work because something I never intended to appear in the story has proven itself to be far more important to the overall impact than I'd ever imagined it would be.

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Lattahs!
akurgal
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