When nightmares come...

Heidi looked a lot like this German Shepherd

As I was watching the Westminster Kennel Club show tonight and the night before, a terrible memory gripped me. I didn't know what to do with it, other than write about it.

My aunt and uncle who lived in Gerritsen Beach had three German shepherds. Back in the 70s, this section of Brooklyn was a rough neighborhood. Teenage thugs used to steal cars and burn them in the open field across the avenue, among other illegal pursuits. My aunt and uncle had the corner lot on their block and a fenced-in backyard, which offered lots of running room for the dogs--Lucky, short for Lucifer, and Heidi who mated and had a pup, Wolfie.

The three of them made a fiercesome pack of sentinels. Standing outside the front door upon arrival as a schoolage child, I'd hear their savage guard-dog symphony, and become terror-filled, afraid to go inside. However, once their master, my uncle, admitted us to their home, the dogs were as accepting of us as if they'd grown up with us.

Lucky was a beautiful boy--white and black, not tan and black like many shepherds. Beautiful, regal, strong. Heidi was the traditional tan and black colors. And Wolfie was almost all black.

My sister and I used to sleep on the sofa bed in the living room when we stayed with them. I remember Wolfie jumping up there and sleeping with us all night--and he was the biggest of the three.

Beautiful, loyal, dutiful dogs.

A couple years after our last visit, I learned that somebody in the neighborhood fed the dogs something tainted with poison and killed them all.

I can't imagine someone poisoning my dog. I cried when I heard the news. I might have even gotten sick--I can't remember. I still tear up when I think about it as I did tonight. Why would someone poison innocent dogs? Because they barked a lot? Dogs bark--that's what they do.

So, now this memory, which I hadn't considered for years, has filled my head. I can scarcely think of anything else to write about.

I ask you, fellow writers. What do you do with searing memories? Do you write about them to assuage painful memories and hope they resolve themselves and leave you alone? Do you exorcise the most painful memories in your writing? Or do you let them remain the substance of nightmares?

You can be too close to what you write

I won’t argue with the guideline that you should write what you know. However, writers need to consider that sometimes they can be too close to a personal experience to write about it well.

Lack of distance can be a trap that snags up storytelling, pace, plot, and character development. In other words, it can sabotage the book in your head you’re dying to and trying to write. It can and often is the dealbreaker.

Writers feel an unnatural and ultimately limiting responsibility to faithfully represent the fictionalized account of something that really happened. They provide too many insignificant details–many more than the reader needs. They fail to use the old flash forward–jumping the time frame of the story–because flashing forward is not true to one's precious memory.

Sorry to be the bearer of painful caveats, but slavish attention to memory isn’t always a writer's friend.

I learned this lesson firsthand in writing my first book–a fictional account of a midlife reckoning. It was gratifying for me to recount every detail of the viewpoint character’s meltdown for the reader. It was my life, I felt violated, and I was writing this book to eke out some poetic justice for myself–my motives were pure. It was a formula for an unsuccessful novel that would have held little interest for most readers.

In my valiant effort to recreate the characters in this autobiographical tale faithfully, I limited my storytelling ability
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Did I learn I from my mistake? Absolutely. In fact, I approached the same theme again in a short story a few months later, this time taking quite a bit of poetic license with the protagonist and antagonist. The protagonist even became a ghost, coming back to haunt the man that drove her to self-destruction. I changed up lots of small details. And it was very freeing. I felt unshackled from my own history and finally able to tell a story, and I did much better job of it. It won a short story contest, and I made my first ever money from writing creatively–at 3 cents a word, that story earned me $90-some bucks.

Now that I’ve committed the I-was-too-close-to-the-story-I-was-writing offense, I recognize it in others. When I point it out, however, people most often balk at the observation.

“Well, I have to say what really happened,” one writer said, when I told him he really didn’t need to share every single detail of his motorcycle ride across New England. He disagreed with me. He won a battle--he stuck to his guns and didn't change a word of his text--but lost the war because he lost a reader.

This topic segues nicely into control, discretion, and writing about something very painful with a healthy amount of emotional distance, which is necessary for exquisite memoir or autobiographical fiction. Some writers can only learn this lesson the hard way. At the time I wrote my first book, I didn’t have a circle of writing friends as resources. I had a burning passion to pour out my story, my keyboard, and my unflinching memory. In the instance of autobiographical fiction, I should have flinched a little.

If you're writing autobiographical fiction, take more license than you think you should with the story. Be brave enough to elllipse details that don't advance character or story. Chances are, you're way too close to it to write about it well.