The Stories our Stories Tell

A few years ago, I went to my first Renaissance faire.

I was working on a novel in which one of the main characters was a ren faire obsessive. I spent some time on rennie message boards learning about what true die-hards might be doing with their off-season time (apparently some people are sewing costumes, practicing speech patterns, and singing along to era-specific songs MONTHS before ye olde turkeye legges come out in full force), and I dove down multiple internet wormholes about what different classes of people might have worn, how to swear Elizabethan style, and how to construct your own hoop skirt.

But obviously that wasn't enough: I had to GO to one of these things. And since my mother is emphatically neither a dork nor the type of woman who dressed herself up for Halloween, too, the entire experience had never really been on my radar before.

How I missed this is beyond me.

What struck me then--and struck me even more forcefully yesterday, when I headed back to the faire just for fun--was the depth of storytelling that all these individuals are engaging in.

Hide & Seek

There's a theory that I'm sure many people would vociferously disagree with: that all books are, to some extent, about the author.

No, they're not all autobiographical. They may not even contain a single recognizably autobiographical element (though I think we could have a three-cocktails-and-you-feel-deep-and-smart argument about how much voice--by which I mean authorial voice--says about the speaker, and how, simply by writing what one chooses to write, one might in fact be revealing huge swathes of personal information, even if the subject matter happens to be vigilante space-puppies). 

Even then, though, the author is putting him or herself onto the page in important ways--the habits the mother in the story has, say, or the speech patterns of the best friend, or the side-character's vocal disdain for disposable diapers and vaccination. Those characters are all fictional, their tics imagined, but they probably have one or more real-life models, and when those models are drawn from an author's life (and where else could they be drawn from, really? Space-puppy reports to command base?), they of necessity tell us something about the author's background, worldview, or relationships. Sometimes the mother is being modeled after a woman observed in the park, and sometimes she's Mommy Dearest, but she probably got that particular way of pinching her nose to bottle a sneeze from some (more or less) known entity. 

Pretty sure the resemblance to dear old Mom isn't always accidental

So what's an author's responsibility to the people s/he knows?