Since John Gardner sounded out so vigorously on what he liked and disliked, I think I will too.
I dislike the politically correct or non-profit view of the world, if it starts to encroach on fiction novels.
A lot of seemingly well-educated people live on jargon, cliches, and key words, canned ideas, preset views and limited imaginations.
Like my classmates in an advanced novel writing course, who all jumped on me as a dog torturer, because I brought in the first page of Mark Bojanowski's award-winning The Dog Fighter, as an example of a great opening.
It begins with the sentence, "In Mexico I fought dogs."
I tried it as the opening of my novella The Lovers, "In Chile I was a ballet dancer." The Lovers was published in Wild River Review on line, with a photo of a woman in black fishnet stockings, dancing, provided by the editor's son. Some women asked me if I'd seen the photo. I did not find it shocking. After all the story is about a stripper and the photo only showed the dancer's stockinged legs.
Some readers think everything I write is about me.
When I say it is not, they don't believe me.
"Ya ya, it isn't you."
I don't know how I could be the male hero of Wolf, who is so athletic he flexes his arms and tries to see if he can wiggle between the top bars of a skylight and jump 20 feet to the ground should the MI raid the house.
I've never been an aging lion, in love with a pregnant human princess in my short story Beast, published in the Northern Virginia Review.
I've never been, not that I know of, either the Black Prince Narasuan in the 16th century, nor The Rider of Crocodiles in 1776, when Ayuthia fell to the Burmese for the last and final time. Needless to say, I have never ridden a horse, and elephant nor a crocodile.
I've never been the Asian young man murdered by a menage a trois of three high- powered gay men in one of the most chic neighborhoods of the nation's capital.
I've never been an Armenian-American photo-journalist who leaves her Burmese boyfriend to become a bikkhuni or female monk in Sri Lanka.
I've never been a female monkey, Shee Monkey, cloud walking with Kuan Yin, the Chinese Goddess of Mercy.
Fiction is written out of empathy, not fact.
"But who is it really? Is it your story or a friend's?"
They don't believe me when I say the only true things in Home is Where? are the mango pickles and the pickle recipe, which you could make from the short story, if you wanted to. In science, it must be possible to replicate and experiment. If you can't, then the mouse's hair might have been dyed, and once was. The sedge in the hey day of botany was made up. When I sold orchids on commission at the Philadelphia flower show, at the end of the day, the vendors pulled a florist's spray of green cymbidiums still in it's glass capsule, out of the pot (color unknown) on display.
A novelist is someone trying to bullshit you to forget reality. I guess I must be a good writer if most readers think all the fiction I write is true.
It's only emotionally true, as the actors and actresses say in interviews on TV.
One childhood friend thought I was really born into an open pit latrine in Once, one of my autobiographical novels (as yet unpublished).
Sometimes my own fiction intrudes as a false memory, as when I thought I remembered myself pregnant and having morning sickness at dinner time, and throwing up in the open drain outside.
But it wasn't me. It was the cook who had TB, and spat a blob of foamy pink spittle in the drain, and we had to let her go, and my husband helped put her in a clinic and paid her medical bills.
Sometimes minor characters "take over" and decide they will be major, and just don't leave, as happened with Thuzar in Wolf.
Sometimes, a fictional scene or event comes to me, as I am looking at a real place.
I went to the Maryland shore this summer, and as I was looking at the stone pier, I was sure in my story a child would be bashed to death there and the corpse hidden under the stones. This idea, I know definitely where it came from.
I was re-reading Nay Lin's superb Cemetery of the Living Dead, in order to get a quote to try and interest some literary agents in translations of Burmese prison novels, and Nay Lin describes a father-son team of murderers who bashed the neighbor's child to death. Of course, I won't and can't use Nay Lin's story.
I "know" from something someone told me more than two decades ago, that the dead child's grandmother swam from Red China to Hong Kong while it was still a British colony. I know the murder I am going to write about happened on the Chesapeake.
Some stories percolate or agitate or coagulate in my consciousness over very long periods of time.
I "work on them" that is, think about these stories while I am in my home, doing housework or whatever.
Some stories were almost told to me, en bloc, by visitors or strangers who told them to me to write them down, like 53 Red Roses (also in the Northern VA Review) -- Some I made up-- as for instance Band of Flesh (published in The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine) about a conjoined twin who hacks herself free.
I got the idea for it when I read an account of Terry Waite chained to a fellow hostage he came to dislike for months.
On reader thought from this I must be interested in Siamese twins, and urged me to go see the twins preserved in formaldehyde at the Twins Museum in Philadelphia, but I am frightened of such things, and can't get the images out of my head, so I did not go.
So please don't ask me the silly question, "Is that you?"
Fiction writers write to understand and escape reality, so why make it real?
Most writers are traumatized and unhappy.
At least I am.
Copyright Kyi May Kaung
See some of stories referred to online or on my website
www.kmkaung.com1-18-2014
