Tuesday, September 28, 2004

The perils of writing "faction"

...Sometimes the facts get in the way of a good story.

Take, for example, the case of author Tom Franklin, who has a psychotic dislike for armadillos — so much so that he pledged to include at least one armadillo death in each of his books.

He was frustrated in the writing of a novel set in 19 th century Alabama, however, by the fact that armadillos had not yet migrated to the Heart of Dixie in that era. Likewise, a coyote scene had to be rewritten to feature a pack of wild dogs instead.

Franklin was one of the featured authors at Books Alive, the annual festival of writers and readers at Gulf Coast Community College on Feb. 7, 2004. It’s a fund-raising event for the Bay County Public Library, and it attracts hundreds of people from the Panhandle to meet, listen to, pick the minds of, and buy autographed books from some of the best writers out there.

Mark Winegardner, recently selected to continue Mario Puzo’s Godfather saga, was the keynote speaker. Other breakout sessions featured Brad Strickland (Star Fleet Academy and other young adult novels); Franklin’s wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly; Panama City native (and Nashville resident) River Jordan; and several others. Numerous local writers also filled the conference hall, which had been converted into a bookstore.

But back to truth and consequences:

Franklin was paired with Tom Piazza in an early-morning session in which they compared and contrasted their approaches to fictionalizing real life events.

In Franklin’s case (Hell in the Breech), it was the story of an outlaw family brought to vigilante justice; in Piazza’s case (My Cold War), it was re-examining his experience growing up in the nuclear shadow of the early 1960s — "duck and cover" drills in the elementary school, memories of his mother’s reaction to the news of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, images of the soulless ranch houses of the suburbs and their bone-thin trees.

Franklin’s armadillo fixation was hilarious, and his run-in with the descendant of one of his fictionalized characters was a lesson for all writers — "I’d change the names, if I had it to do over," he said.

But perhaps the canniest of comments came from Piazza, who, by the way, won a Grammy last Sunday for liner notes he wrote for a jazz CD last year. (Yes, they give Grammies for liner notes).

Asked by a member of the audience if writer’s work had revealed the truth behind the old axiom that "there’s a book in the life of every person," Piazza responded:

"Yes, there probably is a book in every person — but it will probably take somebody else to write it."

And if you do, change the names.

Peace.

***
(This column originally appeared as my weekly "Undercurrents" column in The News Herald, Sunday, February 15, 2004. It seemed appropriate to the subject of writing about my hometown in a fictional fashion.)

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