Our weeklong meditation retreat went great. Happy to report that Stillman Brown did in fact attain enlightenment Friday morning. He is now accepting disciples via comments to this post (I am his secretary, as his being is now too ethereal and pure for the keyboard). The acceptable way to address the guru is His Cuteness, and I will relay the message to his realm of unimpeded consciousness. You should receive your personalized response in 4-6 weeks.

Seriously, we had fun. Now I’m in the great state of Massachusetts, doing a writing retreat, working on finishing a draft of my novel, which is tentatively titled “The Last Year On The Island.” I have to say that it’s going to be a good book.

When I say good, I mean that I will have expressed myself satisfactorily. I don’t mean it’ll be award winning. As a published author, I can tell you that all delusions of grandeur that unpublished authors may harbor toward publication are well…delusional. The best you can do is express yourself and hope a few people connect with the work, and maybe get some hobby income out of it too. If you want to write The Secret, you might be a millionaire. If you want to write a formulaic novel with an intriguing premise, you might get a lucrative screenplay deal out of it. Otherwise, you will always be doing it for the love.
The Last Year On The Island is a new take on a rough novel I wrote over the two years after I finished college. This version is utterly not autobiographical, unlike the first version. And the heartbreaking thing is that as it gets more and more fictional, it becomes more and more real, because it touches more and more on what I was trying to say. Which leads me to my first question: What would an enlightened being like the Buddha say about writing fiction? Is it right speech? Let me know your thoughts.
Although I’m writing fiction, it’s dealing with many themes of direct experience. It’s bringing up much from the realm of factual memory: the end of an interracial friendship, first love, the state of super-progressive education, being a child of divorce, the remnants of 60’s idealism against the backdrop of the anti-idealist Giuliani 90’s, family strife, and a best friend’s insanity. Hell, it even touches on my grandfather and step-grandmother’s double suicide, which I only found out through researching the novel actually made the New York Times obituary page as a double-suicide. And that brings up the question – why does part of me feel cooler that my grandparent’s suicide is a matter of public record? Does it give me more trauma-credibility? Does trauma-cred sell even better than street-cred? Cause I can sell myself as having both, of course.
Writing nonfiction elicits a range of emotional responses in me as a writer, but it feels more superficial. But (re)writing this piece of fiction, ironically, is one of the deeper meditation practices I’ve ever done. Being present with a full range of feelings of sadness, humor, regret, and nostalgia in this writing is happening more than any personal essay or nonfiction book I may’ve written. Sometimes a made up story makes you be much more present. And by the way, it’s got lots of laughs in it, but not a happy ending.
I never did feel connected when I read something like Proust. The obsessive nature of rehashed memory doesn’t touch me. But the way we can actually come to understand our collective memories a little better by falsifying and structuring them into a constructed narrative has always moved me. And I’m not talking about James Frey or A Million Little Pieces. I’m talkin’ bout fiction writing and playwriting and screen-writing. And it’s a process I don’t quite understand. Why is it the case that fiction sometimes breaks your heart more than actual events? Why do they cause you sometimes to be more present than what you actually saw, smelled, tasted, heard, and touched?
And why is telling the story of things in my head getting me more choked up than things that actually happened?