Those we knew before, faded now from our present lives, but not our memory. Faces, personalities, living spirits still so vivid in our minds they could step before us in the next instant without causing a second glance, a single eyeblink: “Oh, there your are. You’ve been gone awhile, but now you’re back, as if hardly a day has passed…” And not just their physical presence but events, experiences we shared, come flooding back, filling us again with what we felt, what we knew together, and somehow oddly seeming even more alive than our moment by moment of now. The craziness of time and life redux.
Flashes of memory. Foolishly taking that psychedelic drive up Strawberry Fields Mountain, the four of us jammed inside that rattling Opel coupe, screaming hysterically at the top of our lungs as the oncoming lights, rounding those mountain curves, exploded our vision with a space-alien kaleidoscope of color. Then, of course, you being the chosen one to drive, deciding, discretion over valor, not to mention the steering wheel in your hands now nothing more than a giant rubber band–ever-stretching this way and that, uncontrollable the best–yawning onward toward its own deadly destiny. Till finally and at last you arrive at that hidden-away Black Forest Gasthaus, where the lovely aproned Fraulein places enormous plates of succulent sustenance before you, and Fat Ollie staring down, tragic-eyed and defeated, at the sizzling, aromatic feast spread before him, saying, “You know, I can’t eat a damn bite.” Or flashing forward to that golden spring afternoon, everyone to meet after duties and school at Oscar’s Inn, when she rounds the city block corner with her friends and sees you, lockstep with Sergeant Burns, releasing her wounded-animal cry and running toward you, finally to you, jumping into your arms, wrapping those lithe arms and legs around you, as to never let you go, and what Bobby said then. What Bobby said then…
Life, doing what it does best, pulling you ever forward, new worlds replacing old ones, time passing–ever now, now, now–but mockingly ineffective in erasing time past. Stories written. Stories of now, or near so. But always those faces, voices, moments, lingering, refusing to die within you. Until you feel, in some sense, you owe it to them. To all of them and to what actually, amazingly, happened then. To capture it before it’s gone, as you, forever. “Don’t we compare?” they ask you. “Don’t we count as much?” Au contraire, you tell them with a smile. Au contraire. But only within your code as a writer. As you never write just for yourself. That’s called a diary. You write, instead, for the connection with the reader. A sharing. A desire they might, in their manner, feel and experience as you have done, enriching and knowing the life-affirming exhilaration and the heartbreak in the effort.
Of course some may choose a memoir. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But suspicious minds prevail and ask: Has a memoir ever been written that’s entirely true? As good and especially great writers are masters of word-deception and embellishment. They can’t help themselves. Taking a fact and stretching it just a teeny-weeny bit, or until it busts embarrassingly at the seams, it’s all the same–no longer a fact but a supportive tidbit, a colorful detail, in the fictive journey. Believe me, they can’t help themselves. Besides, if you’re an imagination junky, facts, alone, are way too restrictive. A bit tepid and boring even, in the overall jist of possibility. Just ask Shakespeare to write a pure, true history, about anything his fantastical, blood-pulsing English heart desires, and see what happens. So what’s left you is something called historical fiction (or, in this instance, referencing the aforementioned passages, something entitled Soldier in Germany).
Still, dangers abound. The melding of time-ghosted fact, as you’ve known and experienced, with the fanciful, hardly controllable imaginings of the moment-by-moment act of creation. Even worse is life-to-life character bleed-over where you’ve researched Henry VIII or Catherine the Great to the nth degree, only to have your own crusty Uncle John’s mannerisms or haughty Aunt Mary’s habits creep in, diluting the waters of portrayal. It’s all a three-dimensional juggling act of time, scope, and the depth of meaning. The mixing of disparate parts into a believable whole. When even that is not enough. Not the goal of your efforts. Which is to move beyond the presence–the feel–of believability to where you and the reader are swimming in the waters of what James Wood said in How Fiction Works, the “lifeness” of the final creation.
Lifeness. Or, to mix metaphors, writing not on the safer, somewhat familiar road you may have past travelled, but through that unknown and invigorating alien landscape where, perhaps, there are no roads. No signposts. Only the rugged, untested terrain, the dangerous, new-and-different curve you’ve never traversed. Where, except for the instincts you’ve harbored, you can’t really count on or be sure what’s coming at you round the bend. If you’ll make it through at all, in fact. Where everything is changing, moment by moment, growing evermore treacherous, word by hard-wrought word, until you finally, in the prophetic words of Jim Morrison, break on through to the other side…and see the laughing girl, crying out and rushing toward you, arms outstretched in the golden spring-afternoon light, seeming beyond make-believe, seeming life itself.