stretching the truth in Magic Marker

I found a book of stories I wrote when I was 5, and oddly enough, it's helping me think more clearly about the fiction I'm writing now.

Lately: My mom was in town over the weekend, and after a summer of less dining out than usual, we went hog wild, with two massive dinners on Saturday and Monday. In between, we saw James Taylor on Sunday night. It was the final show of his summer tour, and it was wonderful. He sounded great for a 76-year-old who’s been wearing out his voice for several months straight, but the highlight might actually have been the stories he told and his energy and enthusiasm. Either he’s a world-class actor, or he was actually having a good time. The show opened with a video of him singing Something in the Way She Moves in the late ’60s, which faded into him singing a few years later, and a few years after that. As the song played continuously, he aged right there on the big screen, and then about halfway through, Taylor himself walked out on stage and picked up where the past version of himself left off. It was extremely poignant, watching a lifetime of work play out over a few minutes, hearing the same song over nearly 60 years of growth and evolution. I started thinking about what it must be like to create art with that kind of staying power, and how it’s possible to still love something you made so long ago.

stretching the truth in Magic Marker

This spring, I was home in St. Louis, sleeping in my childhood bedroom, which has given way to a state of limbo. There are signs I once lived there, but the room has essentially become a tidy landing spot for all the furniture and decor my mother has no better place for. There’s a watercolor above the bed and drawings of European landmarks on an opposing wall. Exactly one art project from my elementary school career has been deemed worthy of display. I didn’t pick out the comforter or the pillows — there are so many pillows — and same goes for the lamp and the nightstand. It’s a bit like staying at a pastel-hued bed and breakfast that’s gotten ahold of artifacts from your past: a prom dress shoved in the back of the closet, a plastic picture frame with a snapshot from sophomore-year homecoming.

A red, spiral-bound notebook, shelved between C.S. Lewis and Harry Potter.

I’m not sure what compelled me to pull it off the bookcase. I expected notes from AP English, somehow overlooked in my mother’s frequent purges. I’ll do her a favor and pitch it, I thought. I’ll save a half-inch of space in a house where books grow like kudzu.

But then I noticed the writing on the front cover, in ballpoint pen pressed down so hard, it left an indent: PICTURES BY JOAN, ADVENTURES FOR KIDS. Inside, I found my first and only completed collection of stories, each one dated with the library stamp I doted on the way another kid would’ve dragged around a baby blanket or worn the same dress six days straight. The first chapter, about a flight with my cousin to China, was Magic Marker-ed on Jan. 20, 1993, about three months before I learned to write semi-competently. I drew the (abstract) art, of myself in a pink dress sitting in an airplane seat. My neighbor, who was 12, wrote the text I dictated, about the snacks we ate and the seat I sat in and what it was like to get our passports stamped.

I had never left the country. I did not have a passport. I guess I did know a thing or two about stamping.

The stories appeared every couple of days, and my cousin and I were the central characters. Our moms and my little brother were repeat villains, spoiling our fun. (This is a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. My brother has not been born. I am happy because all the gifts are mine.) Our dads were hapless, always screwing up when our moms disappeared and left us in their care. (This is my mom and my cousin’s mom, going to a very important meeting. Their plane was very late. It was scary to just have the dads in charge.)

Reading through ADVENTURES FOR KIDS, I felt the urge to time-travel back and kidnap my 5-year-old self. I wanted to lead her by the hand to the present and employ her as my muse. This kid was three years removed from diapers and more perceptive about people’s foibles and anxieties than I am now. Consider this: On Feb. 23, my skills much improved, I drew myself standing next to a tree. This is me outside in my backyard. My mom was collecting the tree seeds because she was going to plant a tree in secret from my dad.

My mom has always had a love-hate relationship with gardening — plants thriving, deer invading, voles infesting, flowers blooming, sweat pooling — and my dad has always told her to do less, to hire someone, to make sure her hobby hasn’t just become a point of stress. In fact, if there’s one tension that exists between my parents, it’s the tug between doing more and doing less. Apparently, I understood that when I was 5 better than I do today.

I’m not here to pen the definitive review of ADVENTURES FOR KIDS, which has a circuitous plot and a rather abrupt ending. I’m here to write about another story, the novel I’m working on, whose plot is rooted in a real-life experience. It’s an okay premise, I think, but that’s all it is: a premise. The rest of it, I need to punch up and make up. I need to pick off the ugly lint of mundane reality to get to something clearer and more exciting.

My favorite of Ann Patchett’s novels is “Commonwealth,” her seventh, which is semi-autobiographical. It’s about a family in the aftermath of a sudden divorce, and it poses questions about who stories belong to. “I certainly drew from things that were much closer to my life,” Patchett told NPR after the novel was published. “I have stepsiblings, I have a sister, I have a mother, I have two stepfathers, I have a stepmother — all these people who are very close to me and very involved in my life, and they have a place in this book. It's not a book about them, but definitely I am using information from our lives.”

I had to read the end of that passage three times before I noticed a crucial word choice. Patchett doesn’t say she used her family for inspiration; she says she used “information from our lives.” And what a difference those four tiny letters make. I realized I’d been framing the relationship between truth and fiction all wrong: Real people aren’t inspiration for the characters I’m writing. They’re sources of information, of tiny truths I can pluck and build entirely new souls around.

So what do my characters need to borrow from the story as I lived it to make the story as I imagine it unfold? And what can I discard? Answering those questions can feel impossible. For instance: The character who’s loosely based on me doesn’t need to have blonde hair, but she does. Last week, I gave her an extra brother. That’s progress. This week, I’m making up a short-lived career in finance; she burned out in her late 20s and caught a big break doing something else. She’s blurry but coming into focus, like a version of me traced through a dozen sheets of carbon paper.

And that’s where the 5-year-old kid with the library stamp comes into play. I need her to stare me down and tell me what matters and what’s trash, to outline the simple motivations and conflicts that will set things into motion. I need her imagination to guide the story to places it’s never been, without feeling guilty for stepping off the trail of the truth.

That kid dictated a lot of nonsense, and once she learned to write, she drew a fair amount of her letters backwards and sideways. But she also absorbed so much more of what was going on around her than I’d have ever guessed. She didn’t know what bias was. She overheard her mom cracking jokes about how her dad could barely pour his own cereal (barely, but he could), and she knew hyperbole was a better tale than the strictest truth. Her dad was not a buffoon, but buffoons can make for better drama than exhausted young surgeons who could definitely keep their kids alive for a few days on Steak ‘n’ Shake and Bisquick pancakes.

She knew she could send someone to China if she wanted to, and that a woman with a secret is always more interesting than the alternative. She wrote parties every weekend and neighbors who peered over fences, ponies and witches and sleepovers in bunk beds stacked 10 high. I read it now, and her message is clear: Write what you know, but remember to write what you don’t know, too.