The Truth About Fiction

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

RM: What was the most surprising thing about writing your first work of fiction?

MT: That people like it. I was so scared that it would suck. I really felt like I didn't know what I was doing while I was writing it, and it's just the most awesome delight that I'm getting good feedback about it, and people are connecting with the characters. When you're writing memoir, in a way, it's so easy. For me, it's really easy, anyway, because the story's already told. It's only my job to write it. And to go into a story that I was creating from scratch was so intimidating. I was so nervous the whole time I was writing it that I wasn't doing a good enough job, or that I was leaving out crucial things that would leave the reader in the dark, or confuse the reader, or bore the reader. And then I also had this total existential crisis while I was writing it, like what's the point of writing fiction, like why am I making these people up? Why am I making up this story when there are so many "real stories" that need to be told. I just had this whole head trip the whole time I was writing it. So I'm really happy that I came out the other side with it, and that it worked, that it held together. It's just an awesome, delightful surprise.

RM: How young were you when you began writing stories?

MT: Oh, really young, like five years old, six years old.

RM: Did these stories have recurring themes?

MT: Yes, children in turmoil. I was inspired a lot by what I was seeing around me and by my own experience. When I was really little, I had surgery to remove a birthmark on the back of my head. And the first thing I remember trying to write was the story of a girl who had a birthmark on the back of her head removed. It was really dramatic. I wrote a story about a girl who had been abused. I wrote a story about a girl who had a developmentally disabled sister who died, and the girl was racked with guilt because she had been made fun of at school for having a sister who was developmentally disabled -- all these super social drama kinds of stories.

RM: What role does your spoken-word work play in your writing?

MT: In the past, it played a huge role because all of the chapters of all of my memoirs originated as pieces that I was writing as spoken-word pieces. So for Passionate Mistakes, Valencia, and The Chelsea Whistle, and even most of Rent Girl, all of those stories were written with an audience in mind, not a readership but a live audience, so it really influenced the way that I wrote. You want to have a certain drama and you want things to move quickly. You only have so much time onstage, and you really want to hold the audience's attention, especially when a lot of the places are bars where people are getting drunk, and their minds are wandering. But now, I am finding that I can kind of trust that what I am writing will end up published, and I am writing a little bit more for the page, not really thinking about the audience, but more about a readership. So that's really fun and different for me to do. The weird thing is that I still have to read these pieces aloud. It's an adjustment learning how to read these pieces that I wrote more for the page than for a live reading.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print