Stories vs. "It's a Great Story"

I've been in the middle of a massive edit on my YA novel, which involves reshaping, building things out, finding better motivations...

...and, of course, cutting things. Loads of things. Big chunks of text that I look at longingly because DAMMIT so much of that was GOOD WRITING!

Some of those things are particularly strange for me this time, though, because this book is based heavily on events I went through, on things that, well, happened.


Ironically, some people's actual actions are apparently "too needlessly cruel" to be believably human. Apparently I just live in a nastier world than some.

But it's good that I'm leaving that stuff out, and reshaping a different narrative around the picked-clean bones. Because what happened wasn't a story, it was a life. Even memoirs are carefully crafted to give the illusion of a narrative; a novel has to rank storytelling above honesty, regardless of the source material.

I feel like this is a good approximation, via cliched visual metaphor, of story-telling from life.

Which, theoretically, is supposed to achieve some sort of higher, more-honest honesty, but that's another issue entirely.

My problem isn't so much that this stuff isn't making it into the book based on events, then. That's good.

But I'm still having a hard time letting go. Not because it's my writing, because some part of me feels like that's an important truth, and it's going to be totally lost.

I've always hoarded memory like it was a physical object. When I was little, I'd also hoard even the most mundane of physical objects because they stored some fragment of memory. Yes, I remember playing with the toy, but beyond that, this is the bag it came in, and the receipt that came with it, and having them evokes the specific experience of buying the toy, one which, without the prompt of a fragment of wilted plastic, might be lost forever.

And this is bigger than that (totally bizarre) impulse; it's a story based on one of the more impactful experiences of my life. Tons of changes had already happened in order to get it to the version I'm now fixing; even more are happening now.

If this story goes forward as THE story, will I lose what happened? Will I overwrite the "real" story with the version I'm carefully weaving in and out of its borders? Whenever I bought a new toy, it came in a new bag, until, digging down, the bag at the bottom of my drawer eventually became totally foreign, unfamiliar, deleted by the fact that others had come in to take its place (and then, thankfully, I could throw it out).

What if the patina of storytelling does the same to the bits of truth resting beneath, hidden from sight by what I've layered on top?

Where do I set down the truth, such as it is, if it doesn't really fit into a story?

See, THIS is why I need hobbies.

And probably a good 'scrip for OCD.