Late one night, I'd invited a guy I'd liked for a long time up to my apartment for a nightcap.
"Am I OK parked there?" he asked.
"You're good til 8 a.m. when you have to feed the meter."
"If I'm here til 8 a.m., then I'll really have a story to tell..." he laughed.
He then explained that as a musician and writer, women he's been romantically involved in often ask him, "Am I going to make it into one of your songs?"
I countered that with the question I'm often asked: "Are you going to write about this in one of your blogs?"
Fair enough. My artistic sensibility compels me to document everything, because I rely less on my imagination and more on experience. It's not necessarily what the story is, but how I choose to tell it. And whether that's through my own words, or photographs, if I can't share what happened, it's as though it never happened.
That makes it difficult when others are involved. Others who would prefer their identities be protected.
I have a travel memoir about my trip to Tunisia last year that I workshopped with the Naked Angels theater company in New York City, and now that it's more or less done, I'm not sure what to do with it. At the very least, I think some names need to be changed, and maybe some identifiable events and characteristics. But if I do that, in order to protect the parties involved, it becomes a different story. And I'm not sure if I'm interested in telling a different story, even slightly modified from what actually happened.
I daresay the most interesting stories in my life fall into that same category.
Sometimes, when I meet other writers, they're not terribly different from me; they just call themselves by other names. Whereas I introduce myself as a memoirist, travel writer, essayist - all the descriptors of an author of creative nonfiction - most others usually self-identify as playwrights, novelists, screenwriters, etc. It's only a very nuanced difference between our approaches and our output: I present real events, conversations and scenarios in a slightly dramatized, narrative format, and they present what they call fiction, inspired by true events.
If you're afraid of your late night actions being reported to the rest of the world, is it any more dangerous to spend time with me, who'll likely omit your name but refuse to change it? Or with the writer who'll pretend that a character isn't you, isn't inspired by you, but will quote you word-for-word, hiding behind the veil of a fictionalized reality?
My inner narcissist always wanted to recognize a glimmer of familiarity in the songs of my past musician romances, but I never really did.
I guess it's my inner narcissist that keeps me writing about my own life, and my own late nights.
I hate that I can't tell you what happened in the hours that followed our conversation....At least not yet, anyway.
