So my second assignment for my writing coach Hannah is due, and I've had a bad headache since reading the questions. Last week I "interviewed" my main character Liza, her likes and dislikes, education, family of origin, religion, parents, siblings, etc. It was a great way for me to get to know her background and what makes her tick.
This week Hannah wants to know more. What embarrasses her? What is she most ashamed of? Does she ever completely melt down, sobbing on the floor, or crawling into a bag of french fries (her favorite food)? What was her relationship with her father like? Her mother? Siblings? Has she ever had a bad fight with her best friend, and why?
Now, I am a very open person. That's my M.O., how people know me. A former boss, after listening to numerous Monday morning stories about my weekends when I was single and living on Capitol Hill, dubbed me Karen "my life is an open book" Beauregard. She said she loved Monday mornings and would not let me get to work until I told her and the rest of our small office at GWU at least one good story. Clearly her life was pathetically boring. But it was great, because I've always found my life endlessly fascinating and funny and assume other people do too.
I also ask people lots of personal and probably inappropriate questions, and they in turn have always told me the most amazing and personal things. My husband used to joke that I shoud've had a talk show like Oprah and we would have been rich. He couldn't believe the stuff people tell me.
But this is different. These are questions about things I don't dwell on, that make me uncomfortable, and that I definitely don't want to share. I guess there is a secret, private part of me after all, and digging around in there is not all that fun. I just completed the assignment and it feels I left my blood and guts on the floor.
But amazingly, it also feels like Liza is this living, breathing, endlessly fascinating person (big surprise, ha ha!) that I can't wait to keep writing about, whose story I absolutely want to tell. (Also not sure I can ever actually let anyone read the novel now.) These exercises are so cool -- Hannah is awesome! Part two of the assignment is to write the next chapter, and here I go.
By the way, if you want to know more about Hannah's classes, check out her website at http://www.hannahrgoodman.com.
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3 comments:
so Lisa is really Karen? and your novel is really an autobiography?
And digging around in other people's lives is fun? Even when they survive by maintaining a level of privacy?
An interesting position that your Hannah has placed you in. Any thoughts about whether asking friends inappropriate questions for your amusement was actually a good thing to be doing?
Hmmm, I don't recall saying I asked personal questions for my own amusement. I also didn’t say my novel was autobiographical, but in some ways every novel is. It's impossible to create a real person without tapping into personal experiences and emotions, even if blended with a fictional character. Whose name, by the way, is Liza with a Z. Named after two of my heroines, Eliza Doolittle and Elizabeth Bennett.
I was actually half joking when I described my questions to others as personal and probably inappropriate. In reality, I usually just tell about myself and people then share with me, completely unprompted. In fact, there have been numerous times when someone will start to tell me something too personal and I think, oh no, don’t tell me this, you’ll hate yourself in the morning! It has happened more than once, and the people DO in fact sometimes regret it. I think my open nature just leads people to open up, even if it’s uncharacteristic of them. I never did it for sport, and I certainly didn’t repeat what they told me.
Some people use privacy to survive, others use humor and self expression. For reasons unclear you seem to have made some negative assumptions about me, at least regarding personal questions and tarantulas.
We all have a very private side. Even in the most open and connected relationships each of us has at least one secret that we will never share with anyone else.
I have always liked questions that force me to think about stuff that I normally don't. It's easy to stay right up there on the surface and always a little scary to confront the deeper things.
I've always thought you should be an investigative reporter because you do tend to uncover things that know one else has...ususally without trying.
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