This Is The Novel That Made A Fiction Writer
When I was 20, and in my first year of University, I decided to take a class on the “Short Story.”
I did my coursework mechanically, finding the classes relatively interesting, with nothing in particular standing out.
Then we were assigned a book.
That book was THE THINGS THEY CARRIED by Tim O’Brien.
It was a collection of short stories about a platoon of American soldiers during the Vietnam war.
One particular scene still sticks out in my memory, as if its etched right into the nooks and nodules of my grey matter.
A young man by the name of Curt Lemon sets off a land mind, obliterating himself, and his remains spray across a tree. The men are then tasked with removing the scattered remains from the tree, flesh by flesh, bit by bit.
The downright horrific absurdity of the scene causes the platoon to break out into a sadistic version of “Lemon Tree.”
One day beneath that Lemon Tree
My love and I did lie
A girl so sweet that
When she smiled
The stars rose in the sky
We passed that summer
Lost in love
Beneath the lemon tree
And this novel is full of gruesome, graphic scenes just like this one, that leave the reader wow’d at the absolute horror of war.
But then something happens halfway through the novel — we’re told that while Tim O’Brien was certainly in the Vietnam war, the stories he had just told the reader weren’t true.
Why?
Because you, the reader, weren’t there. You could never quite understand the visceral, emotional toll that the war took on those that were in it. That’s why he had to lie. He had to make the stories so unbelievably horrific that you would have some semblance—barely a taste—of what they went through.
The truth of the matter wouldn’t have gotten to, well, the truth of the matter.
It was only through fiction that the truth could be captured.
That concept floored me. From that day on, I was hooked. Because, since I was born, all I’ve ever wanted to get to was the truth of… what.
I don’t know—being human? Or, at least, something approaching truth.
The truth of existence, the universe, death, life, art, love, and every single little thing in between. That’s my goal as a writer. Truth. To name it where I find it. To point it out, like a madman digging for gold, and say “ah ha!” there’s some little nugget of wisdom
I want to know what it means, what it truly means, to be human in every single way.
And what better to get at the truth than fiction?
So that’s why I’m a writer. The power of story. The power of fiction to tell the truth. That’s what drives me and that’s what will always drive me.
Why do you want to be a writer?
