Please
welcome Shelley Blanton-Stroud.
It took me
quite a while to figure out what my book, Copy Boy, would be, my trouble
mostly arising from the gap between fact and truth. Facts are verifiable
things. Truth is the meaning an individual makes of the facts we choose to
consider.
I first began
to write ten years ago by focusing on my own family’s history of moving west to
California from Texas and Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl exodus of Okies looking for
work in the Great Depression. I was thinking about a memoir because I had
access to the facts. My father, especially, had dramatic stories to tell, one
of which now sets my book in motion. But it soon became obvious that the “facts”
changed in his every retelling—how old he was, exactly where the incident took
place. And the facts really changed when my father’s siblings shared their versions
of the family story. That’s what happens with memory and with storytelling.
Though I knew my father was telling his truth, I was unsure of what the facts really
were. I didn’t think I could get a memoir right.
So, I decided
to turn to traditional historical references—books and newspapers about the
Dust Bowl/Great Depression period in California—for a more-complete context on
my family’s life. But there was often so much missing in these sources—the feel
of the time.
I turned to
more subjective, artistic, personal work from the period—the photographs and
biography of WPA photographer Dorothea Lange, the
essays of the iconic columnist
Herb Caen, the biographies of folk roots musician Woody Guthrie and SF
Chronicle editor in chief, Paul C. Smith. There was a lot in these sources to
use.
I decided.
I was going to write a historical novel.
But I soon
learned the problem with doing so is the way fact and truth conflict, every
scene requiring a negotiation between the two. Could I use the names of
real-life people in my fiction? Many authors do this, to great effect. And I
have done so, on the periphery—most notably, letting J. R. Oppenheimer wax
philosophic and bed an important character. But I didn’t feel I could do so
with the major characters. I couldn’t take the risk of getting their lives
wrong, factually, in order to create what was my truth about these lives. I couldn’t
limit the story to what “really happened.”
Yet, even
though a person might think authors of straight historical nonfiction would have
an absolute obligation to only rely on facts, many such authors turn to fictive
techniques—creating composite characters, recreating conversations the writer
never heard or read, creating interior thought based on speculation.
At any rate,
for me, it doesn’t make sense to expect a big fat line between fact and fiction;
because scholars have by now established that all memory is a kind of fiction. We
never remember things objectively. Such nonfiction is less like fact than it is
like what we call “truth”—a mix of verifiable facts and one person’s impressions
and reflections about those facts, arrived at via memory.
Even when
the nonfiction historical writer has zero intention to use fictive strategies,
if they collect ten facts but use only nine, the elimination of that ninth
fact, the choice of the writer to focus here, but not there, in favor of their
sense of the truth, introduces the potential for inaccuracy. When you collect
verified facts and then choose which of those you will write about, you are subjectively
creating a particular truth the reader will perceive, and perhaps believe.
This is a
moral weight that historical novelists must bear.
In Copy
Boy, I found early inspiration for my protagonist in the life of iconic San
Francisco columnist, Herb Caen. I never considered using his name (even when my
protagonist was a boy, before I turned him into a cross-dressing girl), not
just because it would be too hard to get everything “right” but because I
wanted the freedom to make my protagonist behave very badly. I wanted to let her
run to the edges of what the real-life writer might have been tempted to do. I
wanted the freedom of letting her do awful things, without the guilt of
attaching a real person’s name to that behavior.
This was
doubly important to me about my father’s stories, which inspired so much in the
book. But those scenes in the novel are not the same as his stories. The facts
aren’t the same. And my truth in using those stories is different than his
truth in telling them in the first place.
Still, I
breathed in relief at his comment after he read my final version of the first
chapter based on his story—Good job. That’s not what really happened.
Connect
with Shelley via her
website, Facebook,
Twitter,
or Instagram.
Find all links
to purchase Copy Boy here, including major online retailers
as well as independent bookstores. Join her online for the book’s launch.
All images courtesy Shelly Blanton-Stroud
