Things Left Unsaid

Let's get one thing clear: the YA Contemporary manuscript I'm shopping right now is NOT a memoir.

But...

The basic narrative events draw heavily on personal experience. Which means that, almost inevitably, people will "recognize" themselves in certain characters (some with more reason than others), since they, as people, stood in a similar position to events as various characters do to the events in the story.

Which begs the question: how much you owe the real people in your life if you choose to write?

If the best friend in my story is influenced by one of my own high school friendships, do I have to give character-her a totally unique appearance? Different traits? Different speech patterns? Or is it better to make her an obvious riff off the real person, since character-her is being drawn through a totally different series of events than real-life-her ever was?

Would you be more flattered to find a version of you in fiction, or more offended?

And if a character in a story who you previously thought looked like you does something you don't like the looks of, is that me (the author) being unfair, or just honest? Or is it totally irrelevant, since this isn't you, it's just someone with a few of your tics and the same hair color, like approximately 27 million other people worldwide?

To some degree, it's all moot: I can't help drawing on people I know for my characters, if for no other reason than people I know are the only fleshed-out models I have of how-people-are.

Of course my mom influences how I think of moms--I only ever had the one. My sisters are going to seep into sisters in stories, because they're the only way I've ever experienced that specific incredibly-close-and-often-still-annoyed-with-one-another relationship.

Maybe it will make people feel better to hear that basically every character I write, ever, has some element of me in him or her (sometimes most of the elements of me). I'm always the first and last primary source I choose to plagiarize.

But that sounds, to me, like self-justification. I want to know, from other writers and from non-writers, how you deal with this (from both sides, as a potentially-violated original or as a thief of all your relationships and experiences).

Would you be okay with seeing bits and pieces--or even whole swathes--of you in someone else's story? Or would you be pissed off, since chances are that, if you keep popping up in someone else's fictional worlds, eventually you won't show to advantage?

And beyond that, should it matter? Should I worry whether people like what they see in my stories when what they see is themselves? Or should I just hide behind the flimsy-looking veil of "it's fiction?"

New Essay on Young Adult Review Network

Usually I'm snarky, or sarcastic, or otherwise deflect-y, because THAT'S HOW PEOPLE DEAL WITH EMOTIONS, RIGHT?

Well, some people. 

Today, though, I wrote an essay for the Young Adult Review Network about one of the many absurd events that orbited around my dad's death. A version of this moment made it into my young adult novel, It Could Be Worse (still looking for representation, possible agent soul-mates!). I'll give you the classic teaser paragraph here; I'd love you to continue reading it there! 

Our Father, Who Art in Heaven (Maybe...)

Note: while I’ve tried to be as honest as possible in this essay, it’s just one person’s memory of very complicated events. It’s not “the” truth, just one version of it. -Jilly

We’d already done the hushed-voices, bedside consultation about whether it was time to pull the plugs.

We’d already suffered through the shock—in one of the endless meetings with the doctors during that last week—of learning that P., the woman we thought of as my dad’s girlfriend, had in fact secretly married him about a week after the attacks started, and in the four months that followed, had told no one. Which made her my secret-stepmother. Which  thought made the inside of my stomach itch.

We’d even managed to make it through the last, agonizing moments, after they pulled out the ventilator that had been keeping him alive; the gurgling, gasping, knocking sounds bubbling up from his weakened lungs as they tried—and failed—to draw breath; the moment, just like in the movies, when the heart monitor’s syncopated rhythm collapsed into a single, drawn-out note, filling the space where my dad used to be with its agonizing, unending screech.

Somehow, it never occurred to me to dread the meeting with the priest.

Naïve, naïve, naïve.

Read the rest at the Young Adult Review Network, an awesome spot for young adult readers and writers!

How To: Get Through a Seemingly Endless Friday

Note: these are only suggestions, and may not work for everyone:

* Induce an extreme allergic reaction without an epi-pen handy.

* Paint eyeballs on your eyelids and train yourself to sleep upright, facing your computer.

* Pretend like the floor is hot lava, and the only safe spots are your chair and the tops of peoples' desks, and the only way you'll make it to the bathroom alive is by rowing your chair with a rudimentary paperclip-based paddle or somehow parkouring between various work stations, then drink a lot of water.

* Weep. At your desk. Loudly.

Just cry it out...

* Form a murder/suicide pact with everyone who shares your cube.

* Create paper dolls of all your co-workers, surreptitiously leave them on their desks when they step away and act confused when they ask you about it. Create a decoy one of yourself so that you can commiserate with them about how "strange" and "creepy" and "prosecutable" it feels later.

* Cat videos.

* Run all your company literature through a translator, then translate that text back into English, then call a company-wide meeting to present your findings on how your company is losing the Tagalog-speaking market.

* Drink.

UPDATE: Practicing what I preach: