Shock factor, shmock factor

“Don’t you know professors read your columns?” “Writing is autobiography, you know.” “Using ‘penis’ in your column doesn’t make you edgy.” “Everyone knows you’re just writing for the shock factor.”
I’ve obviously received lots of friendly comments about my last few columns. I also felt like vomiting after knowing a professor’s 11-year-old daughter read the last one. My only defense is that this is a college paper and that professors were once young hooligans. But, I do feel the need to defend against the claim that I’m going for shock factor. (When I write the “Getting to Know,” however, that is definitely about shock factor.)

We're all familiar with the statistic that people tell an average of 7 lies per day. I'm sure I do, too. Most of mine, however, are lies to myself. I say something enough that eventually even I believe it, and discerning the truth from the lie becomes impossible.Writing used to be a way of circumventing that problem for me--it was a way of always being truthful. Much of writing may indeed be autobiography, thanks to the advice of writing profs everywhere to “write what you know.” My columns always have some root in my own life, but my life is fairly boring, and I am forced to draw upon the lives of my exciting friends.Autobiography, even, is not always truthful. Remember James Frey's A Million Little Pieces? A good writer should not have to rely on autobiography or biography. There is usually a bigger story being told than the one that is rooted in an author’s personal narrative.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is not autobiography, and we are certainly not all women or black, but everyone can feel her story—we feel its truth. If there is a mantra for writing and its truth, and where that truth should be derived from, I'm not sure if there is one. Joseph Campbell would say there is only one story, and thus all of our truths feed into it. For me, I think it would be one of the final lines of the film Shakespeare in Love, when Viola tells the parting Shakespeare "write me well."

Unfortunately, this is not a mantra I have done a good job of holding onto. It is infinitely difficult to write someone well. For me, "write me well" means to write everyone well, despite the pain they may have caused me. Villainizing them is so much easier, just as being remorseful is so much harder than asking for forgiveness. Asking for forgiveness, just like refusing to lie to myself anymore, takes balls.

This is where writing, or any attempt at being truthful to oneself, becomes dangerous territory. I am forced to acknowledge the lies I am telling myself when I see them, black on white. Writing someone well means I can’t wear rose-colored glasses, nor can I completely shut my eyes to the gray area.

Writing the people in my life well sometimes requires the use of words like ‘penis,’ and I just used ‘balls’ in the previous paragraph, and it sometimes requires surveying twelve of my closest friends to get the story I need to make the bigger point work.