|
| |
If
the Truth Be Told
By Elizabeth Eidlitz
As soon we can put words together in declarative sentences, we are taught the
importance of telling the truth. “Truth,” however, is a slippery fish, eluding
nets of definition.
“The” truth is not as accessible as the demonstrative adjective suggests.
Individuals view differently the same places, people, interactions, and events.
Facts shift, depending on the interpreter. The observer's presence alters what
is perceived.
For the writer, memory is a known cheat. But do misremembered particulars make
emotional truths less valid?
When an anthology editor invited submissions from women writers-- “... true
stories... celebrat[ing] the moments that help women everywhere deal with the
cathartic stuff of life...stories about women who have taken charge of their
lives and inspire us to take charge of our own destinies”-- I submitted a first
person story anchored in painful childhood experience, but I invented my
daughter, a catalyst for the narrator's epiphany and a vehicle for the emotional
truth of its theme.
Reminding me that “We are looking for uplifting and inspiring,” the anthology
editor asked for a new ending “to make things seem less grim.”
She was enthusiastic about my revision, which reversed the pessimistic tone of
the final scene. I assumed that recognizing imagination welded to real life, she
must agree with Glimmer Train's editors that “when a writer tries to stay
true to fact, the story doesn't get a full life.”
Yet her restrictive questions for a Q and A section proved otherwise: Have I
changed the way I related to my daughter after my epiphany? Told my daughter
about my relationship with my own mother? How old is my daughter now? How has
our relationship evolved?
Is this the moment when a person of integrity must withdraw the story? How can I
answer the editor's questions without recourse to deliberate falsifications?
“By talking about you and your 'inner child'-- with whom your relationship
changes once you grasp how past relationships can insidiously affect present
ones,” says a friend who is a therapist.
A brilliant “out.” But I resent needing it to save from disqualification a story
considered sufficiently compelling and convincing “to help women everywhere deal
with the cathartic stuff of life.” I resent feeling like a moral midget when
creative non-fiction, presenting an illusion of truth, can be more powerful than
facts in depicting the cathartic stuff of life, and conveying the meaning of
being human as we bumble through what may itself be an illusion, for all we know
and don't know.
“The truth is rarely pure, and never simple,” as Oscar Wilde notes. Editors and
publishers calling for “true stories” corner us into impossible positions.
True stories, the ones that move and inspire us, illustrate Picasso's conviction
that “Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”
The defense rests.
Elizabeth Eidlitz is a teacher, studio potter, biweekly columnist for The
Metrowest Daily News, and freelance writer. Her work has been accepted by such
publications as Williams Alumni Review, Boston Globe, Independent School, Media
& Methods, Momentum, Positive Teens, Parents & Kids, The Middlesex Beat,
Massage, Bear deLuxe, and Police Times. She has co-edited one book (Holt,
Rinehart and Winston), was a finalist in the 2004 Tiny Lights' Personal Essay
Contest, and a winner in the 2005 short story contest sponsored by the Natick
Center for the Arts and the Morse Library in Natick, MA.
| |
Sponsored links
Ring binders
Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer!
How to find a
book publisher
|
