Honesty is such a lonely word, everyone is so untrue…

Billy Joel

There is plenty of hype, false outrage, faux cheerfulness, and general made-to-order opinion in print, onscreen, and online these days. What you need, writers, is honesty.

'Oh, sure, I can do honesty. I have lots of thoughts and ideas. I'll bet they're all original, too. I'm very free with my opinions.'

Ahem. Let's rethink this.

Honesty is hard to do. For one thing, honest writing requires that you get down to the core of things. It can also be painful. Worse, expressing exactly what you mean can be a lot of work. No wonder most writers these days rely on shorthand. They skim along the surface, or they drift with the tide. To do better, you've got to roll up your sleeves and muck in.

Below are a few samples of honest writing. Your assignment is to read them and go through the checklist below. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is the writer describing their own experience, or someone else's?
2. If the experience is their own, what strikes you as authentic about it? How do you think they arrived at this level of authenticity in the account? What kind of work (memory, description, writing/rewriting) does this level of honesty require? How might it help another person to read this account? Is the authenticity of the account related to the benefit a reader gets from the text?
3. If the experience is someone else's, in what way is the writing honest? How do you think the writer managed to achieve this level of truth in their account of someone else's experience? What kind of work (research, interview, empathy) is required to achieve this level of authenticity? How does this kind of work affect the benefit derived by the reader?

Passage 1:

Fear was intensified by adult talk of a terrible earthquake in Japan, where the earth shook, buildings crumbled, and thousands of people were killed. What if an earthquake happened in Portland? Suddenly I did not want my father to work nights. I wanted him home, safe, after dark.

[...]
I lay in bed, determined to stay awake until he came home. I could not die if my father were home. I lay as flat and as still as i could so Death would overlook me, or a Thing hiding under the bed would not know I was there. I fought sleep, praying for dawn, for the first twitter of a bird.

Beverly Cleary, The Girl from Yamhill, p 81

Bonus question: After reading this, are you surprised that the author wrote for children all her life?

Passage 2:

His heart sank so, that for an instant he had to close his eyes.
What could have happened to change the world so completely? Here, in this country, he had been born. Surely he ought to feel at home here. But – the irresistible, evenly moving crowd in the bazaar seemed to put his home at enmity with him. And that young mudir ? Surely he had been scrupulously polite. . . 'The highly esteemed Bagradian family . . .' Yet in a flash Gabriel knew for a certainty that this suavity and its 'highly esteemed family' had been no more than a single piece of insolence. It had been worse – hate masked as courtesy. This same hate flowed around him here. It seared his skin, galled his back. And indeed his back was suddenly panic-stricken, with the panic of a man hunted by enemies, without a soul to befriend him in the world. In Yoghonoluk, apart, in the big house, he had known nothing of all that. And before in Paris? There, in spite of all his prosperity, he had lived in the cool spaces surrounding aliens, who strike root anywhere. Had he struck root here? Here for the first time, in this mean
bazaar, at home, he could measure fully the absolute degree of his alien state upon this earth.

Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, p 28

Bonus question: Werfel wasn't Armenian. How did he know how that felt? Hint: Google Werfel. Also: find out what happened to him. Do you think his attention to the Armenian genocide affected the way he reacted to later events in his own life? Go read Jacobowsky and the Colonel.

Passage 3:

From both sides of the valley little streams slipped out of the hill canyons and fell into the bed of the Salinas River. In the winter of wet years the streams ran full-freshet, and they swelled the river until sometimes it raged and boiled, bank-full, and then it was a destroyer. The river tore the edges of the farm lands and washed whole acres down; it toppled bams and houses into itself, to go floating and bobbing away. It trapped cows and pigs and sheep and drowned them in its muddy brown water and carried them to the sea. Then when the late spring came the river drew in from its edges and the sandbanks appeared. And in the summer the river didn't run at all above ground. Some pools would be left in the deep swirl places under a high bank. The tules and grasses grew back, and willows straightened up with the flood debris in their upper branches. The Salinas was only a part-time river. The summer sun drove it underground. It was not a fine river at all. but it was the only one we had, and so we boasted about it – how dangerous it was in a wet winter and how dry it was in a dry summer. You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden, pp 1-2

Bonus fact: Steinbeck is writing fiction here, but he's describing where he grew up.

Passage 4:

Then there was a supremely humiliating night. The house was quiet and he came home and could be heard shuffling in the hallway as a prelude to ... what? His dropping into oblivion, his pissing in a sink, or some new invention of booze-maddened disruption. But he remained silent. He came to her bedroom nearly soundlessly. It was his thunderous breathing, not his shoes, that woke her. She understood so much by that time – she knew the Latin vocative of a swag of nouns, and the neatness of Pythagoras; she could recite the Chinese dynasties and debate the causes of the First World War. She was barely conscious when she found his hand on her breast, and when she drew in breath to cry out, he covered her mouth with his other hand. She could smell brick dust on it, beer, a trace of his own excreta, as if he lacked the consciousness to clean himself properly. She could feel the calluses indenting her face. That was how her mother, suddenly standing at the door, caught him, caught her. Her mother roared like thunder and he lifted his hand off his daughter’s breast, though the act could not be reversed and took all the divine music out of Pythagoras.

Thomas Keneally, Crimes of the Father

Bonus question: Just how hard is it to get a story like that, which is based on truth, exactly right? Go back and check the details that draw the reader into sharing the horror of the experience. How are they enough, and not too much? How are they not 'gratuitous'? How do you find these details in your writing?

Conclusion: Yes, this is harder than it looks. Yes, it is worthwhile. Yes, it is important to keep working to improve. Writing is a work in progress, always.

Bonus Passage:

I found that I could leave Chilton in the cabin with the lights on and look at him from the dark, surrounded by my friends the dogs. I was invisible then, out there in the dark, the way I am invisible to my characters when I'm in the room with them and they are deciding their fates with little or no help from me.

[…]
I was enjoying my usual immunity while working, my invisibility to Chilton and Graham and the staff, but I was not comfortable in the presence of Dr. Lecter, not sure at all that the doctor could not see me.

Thomas Harris, 'Forward to a Fatal Interview'

Thomas Harris wrote Red Dragon at night. In an otherwise unoccupied house. Out in the middle of a cotton field in Mississippi. With his friends the stray dogs.

I would have been scared to death.

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Dmitri Gheorgheni

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