The Right to Write

One of my favorite writing exercises is pretty simple. I grab a book, flip to a page, and write down the first noun or verb I see. Repeat two more times. Then, write something using all three words. It's a good little exercise that can come up with some interesting results, especially if you do it shortly after getting up, before the Inner Critic and Editor have had their morning coffee.

Anyways, today the book I was using to find words was Novel Ideas: Fantasy, an anthology of short stories and novellas that eventually spurred the author on to full novels or series. I haven't read them all, having found it a fantastic source for my exercise and not wanting to know context for the words, but today, I flipped to the intro page of Orson Scott Card's story Lost Boys.* Well, the only Lost Boys I knew of involved Kiefer Sutherland in a pair fangs, so of course I had to read the intro... where Card described a night of storytelling at a university Halloween party where he decided to tell a ghost story that ended up with half the people present pissed off at him.

Long story short, Card decided to give personalizing a fictional story a try by telling it in first person as if it were fact and had happened to him, even to the point of using his own life and real names. He then added fictional characters and events, like his "eldest son" Scotty and the bodies in their crawlspace. When he later decided to write it as a short story and present it at a workshop, the other writers were furious. One even went as far as telling him he had no right to write a story about losing a son like that unless he actually had.

That got me thinking. Is there anything a writer doesn't have the right to write? It goes right back to that old stand-by of "Write what you know." But people tend to interpret that as, "you can only write your class, race, gender, and lifestyle." Which means people shouldn't write about different family set-ups, professions, or religions, either. Which, frankly, would make for a pretty bleak reading selection, particularly for a fantasy lover like me.

Instead, I prefer to think of it as having a deeper meaning. Humans were granted an amazing imagination, and we "know" a lot more than we give ourselves credit for. We all know the basic emotions: love, joy, anger, sadness, grief, desperation, fear, embarrassment, etc. Writers can take those emotion and extrapolate them into what their characters are feeling, and through their words, they can inspire their readers to feel those things, too. Imagination is a powerful thing.

Am I saying screw the research and just write whatever the heck you want? Not if you want it read by other people. Do the research, listen to people who have lived through something similar, pay attention, and then put that wonderful imagination to work.

So did Orson Scott Card have a right to write that short story from the first person? In my opinion, absolutely. As he wrote in his afterward, he may not have lost a child to death, but he knew intimately what it was like to have a child who couldn't really live the way all parents want their children to. The emotions in his story came from a very real place, and it resulted in a powerful story. That people would get outraged over the fact that he hadn't had a child die seems ridiculous to me. It's fiction - the truth is in the lies.

* This is the story that he later turned into the full-length book, Lost Boys: A Novel. Obviously, a lot changed, but the key idea seems to have stayed the same.