SuperForest

Is it true we write only what we know?  How do we define that?
I write about tragedy I’ve never felt, cultures I don’t belong to, places I’ve never visited, romances based on stars and baseball and things I don’t believe in.  I’ve written the struggle of an island stranded dog trying to survive, when I’ve never had a dog.  Or been stranded myself.

So how do we define this:  what we know?

Could we say then that we write not our experiences but our dreams?  Our fantasies, our fears, our nightmares, our desires?  Yes this sounds true.  Like a writing seminar I’ve been to where the room is suddenly expanded and inspired.  But then do we not  also know lies?

Is it true that we can write the untruth?

I feel that I have built a career writing what I do not know.  I do not know what it is like to be a member of a family of art thieves.  I do not know what made famous Hawaiian surfer Eddie Aikau go.  What he felt or thought or believed in that last, or any day of his life.  But to make it true I must write untruth so it feels real.  Like the man who video-tapes every day of his life so when he ages, he can look back and remember the truth.  But I wonder will that life become the memory of a red light, a camera lens always ready?

What is truth?

And why should that be the ultimate goal of the storyteller, or the liver of life?  Truth held so high on the virtue spectrum.  Truth as mutable and shifting as time or tide.  Not historians, not the winners, not poets, prophets or storytellers alone…

Everyone writes the story of their life.  What they know and what they do not know.  What they dream, and fear, desire and destroy.  Truth and untruth — becoming truth again.

Every truth is a story.  Every reality someone’s myth.  We write what we can.