Years ago I went to hear a singer-songwriter whose songs were darkly eccentric and her stage presence full of mystery.
If she had sung her songs without comment, I would have been the first to worship at her temple. But instead she explained how each song came about, sometimes AFTER singing it, with a few remarks, in monotone, about its source–an item in the New York Times, a phrase her grandma used to use, a cute remark by her toddler, etc. She had a great talent, but undercut it with trivial patter, shrinking her songs down to the level of everyday banality.
Is there advice here for the novelist? Yes: Keep your sources, whatever they are, outside the boundaries of your dust jacket.
In fiction, it’s the illusion that counts. Your reader hasn’t come to you for news about YOUR life (harsh, but true), nor for revelations about the everyday details of your creative process, your research, or your overarching intention. They want to luxuriate inside the bubble of a good story. And they don’t want anything to pop that bubble.
Magic is no fun if you know how every trick is done.
Kurt Vonnegut was a total believer that every element–title, dedication, preface, chapter headings, everything–should be part of furthering the illusion. Mother Night, for example, is a novel about a WWII double agent facing execution. It is dedicated to “Mata Hari.”
For David Guterson, the principle doesn’t seem so crucial. In Snow Falling on Cedars, a WWII-era California Anglo boy and his Japanese-American girlfriend are wrenched apart by the the ruthless concentration-camp internment of her and her family. I loved this book. I finished it thanking Guterson for the experience it gave me.
Then I read his afterword, a thank-you to the archive where he got his story material, and the bubble popped. Now it was history.
(Nothing wrong with history. But that’s not what I come to a novel for.)
Mind you, I’m not saying you have to be an ingrate. Guterson was right to credit the archive–I’m just saying, think twice before you put it BETWEEN THE COVERS OF YOUR NOVEL.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
“BETWEEN THE COVERS OF YOUR NOVEL”
Protip: if you’re writing a blog about writing, don’t undermine your own authority by revealing a profound ignorance of publishing. Acknowledgments of direct source material are not discretionary. They are made for legal reasons and to ward against accusations of plagiarism.
Thanks for the wisdom, MTM, but my point was that novelists must protect the integrity of their stories by not needlessly revealing sources.
No one in his right mind would question acknowledgments that are legally necessary. I assumed we had a common understanding of that, but apparently I should have spelled it out.
Again, my concern is about including sources not legally required. Not even publishers insist on this. My novel I Killed Hemingway drew heavily on several excellent biographies of Ernest Hemingway. I did not acknowledge any of them inside the book because to do so would have damaged the effectiveness of my concept–nor did St. Martin’s or Picador or their lawyers (!) even suggest it.
Novels are inventions; even when “fact-based” they enter the world as products of imagination. That is a vulnerable state, and the point of my post was and is that novelists should be prepared to nurture and protect it. Where FICTION is concerned, that means resisting the urge to thank in print every source that ever inspired the writer.
On occasion I’ve wrestled with my publishers over issues of permission and attribution. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. If I’ve learned anything, it’s how quickly house lawyers will run to tell you you’ve crossed a line. But that’s their job. It’s the novelist’s job to make their story as close to 100% successful as possible. Full stop.
I stand by my post.
A novelist is not obliged to acknowledge sources that serve as inspiration for an imagined story. This blogger is not talking about Doris Kearns Goodwin plagiarizing from a biography or anything like that. The commenter shoots arrows but is wrong when he accuses the blogger of “revealing an ignorance of publishing.” This anonymous commenter doesn’t understand the difference between fiction and biography or get that somebody can draw on a documented source without plagiarizing.