I have what I believe to be a pretty good story, sitting in my head. I know the plot, the characters and most of the scenes. I have the dialogue.
Action, adventure, romance, comedy. This story has it all. Opening scene? Could go in several different directions: A call girl, at a bachelor party, trying to explain to the drunken groom why she's worth more than the hookers giving blow-jobs in the bathrooms. A small plane, daredevil pilot and drunken passengers, flying under a rural bridge, very late at night. Two men, sitting at a bar, drinking beer, waiting for the blotter acid to kick in. A naked man, standing on a balcony, yelling down at a room full of partiers, telling a man to get up into the bedroom and fuck his wife. Because she wants him as much as he wants her, and he's tired of pretending it's not true. A cab driver, parking beside a tent in a field, a wedding party assembled, swinging his meter off, and telling his fare he'll wait to either take two people the hell away from there in a hurry, or to take the man off someplace to get drunk.
Each could kick it off well. Each supports the overall story.
I have not committed a line of it to paper. Have not opened a file. I think about it a couple times a year. I think about chopping it up, using the bits as parts of other stories. As jumping off points. I think - what the hell, just get it out get it down, get it out of my head. See if it is as good as I think it will be.
Never have. Not sure I ever will.
Because parts of it are based on the lives of real people. People who might be damaged by the story. Even if no one but them recognized the truth in it. And thinking about any one of them, sitting with the knowledge that this story is out in public. People laughing at the funny bits, tearing up at the sad bits, cheering at the adventurous bits- and them thinking... "That's not the way it really happened. That's not what I really said." Or did or thought or felt.
Sitting there with the results of all the decisions I made without their input, in telling stories of their lives.
Sitting there with my decision to use their lives to tell the story I wanted to tell.
It bothers me. It worries me. It concerns me, in the most serious version of each phrase.
This is the awesome, the terrifying reality of being a writer. If you are telling stories or using characters that are in any way based on reality- touching on real people and their real lives?
You can change what happened to suit what you want to have happened. Higgins and Eliza, in your story, will end up together. The well qualified candidate will win the office. The lost race will be won, the sad romance made happy, the losers victorious.
The question is- should you?
To me, a writer always has the obligation, fact or fiction, to get the story right. If working from a basis in reality, that reality must be respected. If working with people's lives, those lives must be respected.
Your version of that person, of that sequence of events, may not, in the end, have more than a cursory resemblance to the actuality. But that semblance must be honest.
I can do that. But if I do, I have to do it with clean hands. And in the case of this story, that means telling things that will almost certainly hurt people to see or read.
So the story sits in my head. Waiting until such a time as I believe that I can tell it well enough and honest enough that anyone who sees themselves in it will accept that it was respectfully done. That, even if events in the story do not start, stop or end as they did in real life, the echo of real life is there.
But man, oh man, is it tempting.
Thoughts, please?
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