A few weeks ago, I went through an experience that brought home the notion of my own mortality in a violent way. Recovering from it is a process, one I’ve only begun to navigate. Although even before the event, I was already averse to watching or reading about violence both from my genetic temperament and because of things that happened to me as a child, the last few weeks have made me even more sensitive to being provoked by images of violence.
For grad school, I’ve been reading some selections from Barbara Kingsolver. In “Careful What You Let in the Door,” she quotes a letter to her that says, “To invent violence that didn’t really happen, even for the noblest of motives, like making everybody see how stupid war is, puts it out there for entertainment.”
Kingsolver responds a few paragraphs later with, “In time, with practice, you learn that violence isn’t a necessary component of exciting art… If you don’t have to, why would you want to create violence in art?”
This forced me to remember the violent sections in my novel Ride On. There are only two, and even though it’s been over four years since I wrote the first one of them, I still remember where I was when I wrote it and how it felt knowing what I was sitting down to write. It was a very hard experience because that chapter, unlike the rest of the book, is pure autobiography nestled into a work of fiction. When Richard is almost murdered and then gets arrested for it, it happens to Richard in the book, but it’s an almost-unchanged account of what happened to me in real life.
Richard is not an author insert: I have never been an elite cyclist, nor would I want to be. However, in this case, he was a vessel. Even that wasn’t intentional; I wanted him to be scarred in an invisible way to mirror Eileen’s quite physical scars. I spent several days thinking of approaches to this, but I kept coming to the same dead end: there was no fictional way to hurt him that would have the impact of what had actually happened to me.
Setting the matter of impact aside, when I sat down to write that chapter, I felt a strange sort of permission because I wasn’t, as Kingsolver’s letter writer said, inventing violence that didn’t really happen. I wasn’t adding to the already hideously-too-large pile of invented violence: I was simply recounting a real story under the veneer of fiction. That somehow made it easier, and that chapter was written in only a few hours, which is much, much faster than my normal writing. I didn’t have to stop and ponder a hundred times a page, “Is this plausible? Is this how character A would react to situation B? Is this too over the top, not worth writing about, etc.?” I just wrote what had happened and it flowed.
I can see now why memoir is such a popular thing for people to write, especially for amateurs: it’s so easy when you don’t have to make anything up. Creative writing is creation; memoir is relation. It’s much easier to pull something out of your memory than it is to pull it out of your butt.
The second violent section is completely made up. It concerns the dog, Orion, and I have also never been a dog, although I admire a dog’s life, if not its lifespan. He’s a lovable character, and he plays a part in the action at several points. However, there’s only so much one can do with a character that doesn’t have thumbs and can’t speak, so it took an act of violence to give him the chance to show that he’s as loving as he is lovable. Standing up for the people one loves is the noblest of motives—it’s why the United States has two holidays for veterans, Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day, but only one holiday for presidents.
Kingsolver is certainly correct about violence not being a necessary component of art. One of my favorite novels that I’ve written is almost a quarter of a million words long, and in all those pages, not a single person lays a finger on anyone in a violent way, but it’s also the one where I felt like I was finally getting really good at punching the reader in the gut. By the end of it, every character in the novel is hurt, but no overt violence happens.
Kingsolver’s letter writer failed to make a distinction between necessary/justified violence and gratuitous violence. Gratuitous violence is something we definitely have too much of today: almost every movie trailer has someone getting punched in the face because writers can’t tell the difference between violence and drama, or have simply been too lazy to care for so long we’ve stopped noticing. Screaming is rarely the loudest way to say something.
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