When False is Sort of True

Zestful Blog Post #257

I’ve always had a morbid curiosity about unusual crimes, from the JFK assassination to the Manson murders to the two Teds (Bundy and Kaczynski) to OJ, on and on. This fits into my obsession with “Why do people do what they do?” Which fits into my obsession with writing with as much truth and authenticity as possible. One crime that’s gotten revived lately is the Tonya Harding – Nancy Kerrigan affair from 1994, due to the award-winning biopic “I, Tonya.” The picture came out last fall, in time to be discussed in the run-up to this year’s winter Olympics. Having been fascinated by the crime as it unfolded in real life, I made a point to see the movie, which I found fascinating as well.

I mean, what a story! Redneck skating champion wearing too many sequins and acting too athletic, dissed by the girls-gotta-be-pretty skating establishment, prompts an attack on her rival, the dazzling dream girl in the white lace dress. We have the sleazy boyfriend, the thug with the police baton, the semiliterate bodyguard, and the giant stage of the top athletic competition in the world. We have the bar owner who checks her dumpster for unauthorized trash and finds incriminating notes in redneck skater’s handwriting. I mean, my God. I was riveted to every report, having long been a fan of Olympic figure skating (ref. Zestful posts 158 and 252). It was especially thrilling to me that the attack occurred in my home zone of Detroit, in Cobo Arena. I still remember that Shane Stant was reported to have stayed in the Super 8 motel on Middlebelt Road next to Detroit Metro Airport, mere yards away from the impact point of Northwest Airlines flight 255, which crashed in 1987, killing all aboard but one little girl. Another compelling story, albeit not a criminal one.

The other day I read an amazingly sensitive profile on Tonya written by Taffy Brodesser-Akner in the January 10, 2018 New York Times.

[Bronze sculpture by Abestenia Saint Leger Eberle (American, Webster City, Iowa 1878–1942 New York), 1906. It’s a public-domain image; what can I say?]

The writer sat down with Tonya and took her seriously, and got a whole lot of the inner Tonya that no one had gotten before. So many lessons here:

A caricature is not a person.

All you have to do is listen with some measure of respect and yes, compassion.

People want to tell their story, but only if they feel they’re not being judged.

My truth may not mesh with your truth.

Here is a quote from near the end of the article:

“A lot of what she said wasn’t true. She contradicted herself endlessly. But she reminded me of other people I’ve known who have survived trauma and abuse, and who tell their stories again and again to explain what happened to them but also to process it themselves. The things she said that were false—they were spiritually true, meaning they made her point, and she seemed to believe them.”

Isn’t spiritual truth a great term? This is something we as writers need to keep handy. We create characters, and they need to seem real. Nobody acts logically all the time; nobody thinks every single thing through before they do it. Nobody can see the big picture all the time. The big picture for Tonya was, she was surrounded by goons, and goons can’t do anything right, and they can’t keep their mouths shut. All this is apart from right vs. wrong. Everybody has their spiritual truth. And pretty much everybody, from the three-year-old who steals a cookie to the investment banker who builds a Ponzi scheme to the serial killer who stalks and slaughters as often as possible, feels their behavior is justified, at least at first. Self-justification is a big deal to us humans. We do things, and we want those things to be right. We want to be seen by others as being, always, somehow, in the right. Sometimes we are.

It’s easy and fun to paint somebody with one simple stupid color. But it’s not the best we can do. I’m not saying perps ought to get a free pass if they’ve had a shitty life. But letting them talk helps us understand them. So, keep letting your characters talk to you. Make them sit down over a beer or coffee and talk to you. Remember the idea of spiritual truth. Good guys, bad guys. Make them tell you their stories, from the beginning. Don’t judge them. That’s the job of your readers. When we understand, we can create something authentic, nuanced, compelling—and zestful.

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Poor Fred

Zestful Blog Post #142

This post is about choices and their ramifications.

Yesterday Marcia read to me a snippet from last Sunday’s New York Times (which sits around the house in increasing stages of decomposition through the week) about the editing process. Basically, the photo editors were talking about how hard it is to select images to publish, from the thousands they have access to via their own photographers and the wire services. (I cling to the cool term ‘wire services,’ even though we all know the truth.) I was like, yeah, tell me about it. I’d been there, even as a lowly reporter and photographer for a local weekly paper. Which image tells the story best? What really is the story in the first place? Moreover, which image tells the story from the angle we want to tell it? Because there’s an angle to most every story.

Then there’s the public and its appetites. Sensational always sells better. But when the public itself is being represented, their standards are quite different. Inclusion is what matters. I learned this quickly, just out of college, at the paper.

One day the community theater troupe sent me tickets to its upcoming production, some closed-room mystery play. I went to the dress rehearsal, took some pictures and interviewed the director, then attended opening night. I wrote an enthusiastic article about the play and the players, and made it into a big feature spread with two or three pictures.

I heard nothing from the troupe after that, though. I wondered if something was wrong; usually you get a note or a phone call of thanks for such nice publicity. By happenstance, I bumped into one of the actresses at the drugstore and asked her what the troupe thought of the article.

“Oh, yes,” she said sadly. “Poor Fred.”

Turns out I had mentioned every single cast member in the article except the guy who played the cop who comes in and arrests everybody at the end. He was in none of the pictures I ran. I think he had one or two lines. Fred was crushed that he’d been excluded from my coverage, AND THAT WAS ALL THAT MATTERED.

Then there was the children’s ice show. Having, believe it or not, taken a term of figure skating in college for physical education, I laced up my skates and got out on the ice with the kids during a practice. I took some closeups and zooming action shots. A cluster of parents were watching, however, with increasing displeasure.

 They cornered me and demanded that I take off my damn skates and climb up to the top of the bleachers while they got ALL the kids onto the ice at one time. They wanted one group shot of all two hundred kids, so that every kid could “have their picture in the paper.”

I obliged, thinking I might just run the good shots anyway. But I didn’t; for some perverse reason I ran the group picture. The photo, reproduced on newsprint at about four by five inches, looked like a bunch of poppy seeds clustered on a white cake. I think I wanted to say to the parents, “There’s your group shot, and none of your kids are recognizable except as poppy seeds.” But I got no complaints. Had I been the New York Times, I would have run one or two of the good shots and to hell with what the parents want.

The moral of the story is that scale matters. When readers outweigh your subjects, you make one choice. When your subjects practically outweigh your readers, you just might want to make a different choice. The public is bloodthirsty when it comes to news about other people, but as sensitive as a bouquet of orchids when it comes to themselves. You don’t have to cater to that, and sometimes you can’t. But it is a choice.

As writers, closeness to our subjects can be a blessing and a curse. One must harden oneself.

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