I say that as an admission because, apparently, that fact that I don’t Tweet (is that right?) is quickly becoming a crime in the literary promotion realm.  But early on when I first heard about this new technology, I made an arbitrary decision (which describes most of my decisions) that I would be the last writer under the age of, say, seventy to Tweet anything to anyone for any reason.  (For those who doubt this, I swore the same solemn vow about refusing to own a cell phone, and I still live cell phone free.)  So while Neil Gaiman can light the world on fire with 255 or however many characters of text (he could probably do it with 4), politicians have a new realm for their snake-tongued soundbites, and their daughters can scandalize the public by sharing photos of their endowments, anyone reading this here will have to display the patience to plow through 250 or so whole words.   Maybe even more.  Bravo for those of you willing to brave the marathon!

*****

For those who aren’t aware, there’s a new Kurt Vonnegut short story—excerpted from a forthcoming volume of his unpublished fiction—that you can read for free in Vanity Fair.  It’s all about a woman who writes the story of her life and how her husband is this brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine, and sells said story, becomes rich, and all this ruins her life.  Anyone doubting that Vonnegut actually wrote the thing only need read that the story in the story takes place in “Hypocrites’ Junction” to know of its authenticity.  Read the story and improve your life, because this is what all Kurt Vonnegut stories do. 

For my part, I am determined to test his hypothesis.  I now intend to write lots of stories that sell for lots of money, draw inspiration for these from my brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine wife (Note to self: get brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine wife), and see whether it makes me miserable.  Preliminary results aren’t in yet, but I’m leaning a little more toward ”exultant” rather than “unhappy.”

*****

Random yet important thought (which characterizes most of my thoughts, I believe): Including the words ”based on a true story” on either cover of a novel—or anywhere in between—is one of the worst and most pointless ideas statistically possible, even from a random firing of neurons.  It’s like a highway slathered in mayonnaise.  I see many possible repercussions, but none that justify sticking the one with the other, and none of which I can possibly see as beneficial.  A novel means fiction.  It means “I made this up.”  How, exactly, does the qualifying “based on a true story” change that?  By indicating that some unidentified portions of the text to some unidentified degree correlate to some unidentified situations in the life of a person who may or may not be identifiable by the name used or, in many cases, would more accurately be described as an aggregate person combining several products of the above simple formula. 

What? 

You made the story say what you want, when you want, and where you want.  That’s fiction.  If all it took to make something “based on a true story” was correlation of inspiration to a “real” event there would be no such thing as fiction.  Every story ever written reflects the human experience of reality.  Every story is “based on a true story.”  In fact, every story is “based on the life story of its creator.”  All story is, therefore, “true.”  Not all story is factual.  (All the world’s—or worlds’, whichever you prefer—wisdom is rooted in semantics, after all.) 

So let’s get our terms right, okay.  If you’re writing a story that incorporates many facts you’ve uncovered about some person’s life or experience, and you change those when desired to craft effect, you’re writing a novel.  It’s fiction, so don’t go trying to invent some in-between quasi-realm where a story that didn’t happen will feel more tangible.  The moment a reader reads “novel” they, by necessity, doubt every word of every page in the book.  Whether things really happened or not becomes, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant.

The point, I guess, is this: if you want to tell people what happened, do it as well as you can without sacrificing veracity, or as much of it as you can attain; if you just want to give people the best story possible, who cares which parts of the story were inspired by what.  And if you’re trying to do both without doing either completely, you’re ladeling more mayonnaise on your highway.  Go ahead if you want, but I’ve got this bad feeling that whatever else happens, as the day drags on I think things are likely to start stinking in the sun.