Truth Machine
I had a lot of fun drafting my most recent novel. It’s a romance with a dash of mystery, full of trans characters falling in love and building their lives. I set it in rural Texas, a place that no longer feels hospitable to me but that I still love in my heart. I had fun drafting it, which could be an end in itself. But to me, writing fiction is always about asking questions and seeking answers, and that makes it a spiritual practice.
In the last year, I came to think of fiction writing as an experiment, following a bastardized scientific method. Start with a question; for this book, one question I had was, “How does learning something new about history materially alter your life?” Given that question, you begin to set up the experiment to test it. Generate some characters, and give them ways to relate to each other. Think of a plot, or at least the beginning of one. And from there, you write, and you follow the story where it goes. At the end, you have an answer to your question–or sometimes, an answer to a question you didn’t even know you were asking.
That’s the magic of drafting: you don’t know what will happen until you write it. Once you have an answer you’re happy with, you can edit, and shape the unwieldy first draft into a conduit for your new truth. Language, setting, and story–all can be manipulated to serve the new truth you’ve made.
Because that’s what fiction does, at its best: it creates truth. In A Time Outside this Time, Amitava Kumar reflects on storytelling: “What is the truth but the story we tell about it?” I once believed in grand universal truths, things that held across time and space and would never change. Truths that were ordained from above, from an all-powerful God.
I still have convictions, but I’m not so sure about the nature of truth anymore. I think all of us, in some way, are god, and I think that we all create truth in the stories we tell. Fiction writing, to me, is one of the most powerful ways of creating truth. In the novel I recently finished drafting, I created a few truths: trans people have always existed, and trans people have opportunities for joy, and history shapes every corner of our lives, and hard choices are best made in good company. I hold these things as true, now that I’ve written them.
I also write nonfiction, which I believe involves truth-making as well, but I think my fiction writing practice is uniquely spiritual. The first reason is that in fiction, I’m given the gift of abstraction. If I want to write a personal essay that touches on the limits of love, I am mining my life in a direct way. Sometimes, the distance afforded by fiction, filled as it is with imagined people and unreal scenarios, lets me get closer to my questions. The stakes are lower; I’m attached to what I’m writing, but I’m no longer making myself a subject. The other gift of fiction is control. Like a scientist measures in a pipette, as a fiction writer, I can portion out plot and language so everything happens as I intend.
Several months ago, I defined a spiritual practice as any attempt to find meaning beyond the human in a text or activity. When I write fiction, the questions I ask seldom have simple answers, and the answers I come up with are not the final word on the subject. That’s the beauty of a robust spirituality, divorced from a prescriptivist church. I can come up with a different answer ten times, and they can all be true. And I’ll keep writing, because I never find satisfaction in a single answer.
