autobiografake

I have this driving ambition to write a novel. I've tried many a time and have failed miserably because my two areas I excel in are 1. short story and 2. bad poetry. The longer pieces I try to write tend to be several short stories and often a poem thrown in for good measure; a Franken-story if you will. I started a novel about a revolutionary whose neighbor was a blind piano prodigy and disapproved of his plans to overthrow the dictatorship. I have the beginnings of a screenplay about a man who steals shoes to earn a living. What I don't have is something tangible to go with, something that keeps rolling and doesn't end once the short story ends.

I was driving in the Sienna back home today listening to what I thought was CBC but was actually CKUA and it struck me that since I thought what was fact was actually fictional, why couldn't we blur the lines between fiction and fact? Y'all know I love pathology, and it got me rolling on the idea of spontaneous confabulation, the inability for individuals tending to have anterior limbic damage to be unable to detect error in their ongoing reality. They retrieve false memories and come up with ridiculous stories to fake their way through justifying their nonsensical thoughts, often with very erroneous and hilarious conclusions.

So that really stuck to me because I thought a good way to write a long story would be to make it autobiographical because life is long and it's full of details and character development and earth-shaking events and it would be an easy way to get the length part of it sorted out. The problem is that my life is largely quite boring. So I figured I could embellish a little bit and mix it up with fiction in the manner I always do. I mean in the manner I always write fiction, not in that I mix fiction into my life. At least I try not to.

So okay, I know it's been done before. There are plenty of fake autobiographies, it's all very Million Little Pieces. But the idea here is that I don't put it off as something that isn't what it is. It will be plain that it is part autobiography and part fakery (first sentence: This is a story that's true, but not true.?), and the fun part is that the reader gets to tease apart what's reality and what's not all for themselves. It will be fun because it will rest entirely on my prowess in verisimilitude, and only I will know what's real and what's hoax. It's like a mystery with an unknown ending, the funnest kind - think mystique like what's in the suitcase in Ronin or what did Bill Murray say at the end of Lost in Translation? Some parts will be serious, but really not, some parts whimsical...but really not...or is it?

It's an idea I could run with. Potentially. We'll see.