Does a writer have the right to write about their world gone wrong?
A few days ago I wrote a short piece looking back at Like a Rolling Stone by the never-ending Bob Dylan. LRS is a song that changed the world … six minutes of angst, anger, vitriol and viciousness.
Bob was a wild skinny foppish wisp of will-and-determination who brought a tortured voice of poetry and accusation to a world slopping its way through the mud and the blood of war, violence and hatred.
That was back in 1965 – the era of short melodic a-doo-ron-ron two minute love songs to your girl, your mum, your car and your dog.
But LRS launched itself out of the mono-speaker in dad’s valve radio like a banshee in shades, howled, melted the wallpaper, came on at your girl, boiled your car, licked your mother and kicked your dog in the b*llocks.
And it shocked, mystified, appalled and frightened your parents, particularly those who extolled the virtues of their working-class background yet aspired to the middling mordancy of the middle-classes who are bit squiffy in Torremolinos and down the Tory club.
The six minute song was based on a blues standard, glistened like a Christmas tree of Phil Spector’s wall of sound, had the hip-ness of The Beats, the arrogance of rock ‘n’ roll and was searingly honest – telling things just how they were.
And that’s the point … writers are told to write about what they know.
So, does that include members of your family or friends, warts and all?
I say yes.
I am first and foremost a writer, but my mainstay has always been journalism and I have always told the truth. That’s my job. And like 95 per cent of my colleagues I have never knowingly published anything untrue.
That’s what writing is about … publish and be damned.
Well, I was damned – by somebody who should be close to me – and they have never spoken to me since.
My literary crime?
I used a figure from their lives to creative the tension of juxtaposition between a Bob Dylan figure and the regular bloke on the street back then.
My memory is clear. I was brought up in a noisy laughter-ridden sometimes brutal big beer drinking back street town of pubs butchers and scruffy terraced houses. Big men, beery men, dripping Park Drive from their bottom lips, proud of their beer bellies that turned the belts of their work-pants into wobbly slings.
Real men liked to look pregnant way back in the 60s.
Real men in the 60s drank and smoked too much, admired celebrity drunks like John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, saw women as things to be shouted at and ridiculed regularly… treat’m mean, keep’m keen.
Real men gauged each other’s worth by how much beer they could drink, how many cigarettes they smoked and how many husbands they claimed to have cuckolded behind their own wife’s back.
I wrote about a real man just like this … a man I watched go apoplectic when out-of-the-blue Dylan’s anthem burst from the airwaves. His re-action was madness. And terribly frightening for any child already flying head-long into the exotic horrors of puberty.
This man was the juxtaposition … Bob, spooky, androgynous, mysterious, artistic. Skinny as a rake … on the other hand, our 60s artisan was a big general construction worker, bluff, inarticulate, angry, uncomprehending, humourless and dark, dark, dark.
And he drank cider on the privacy of his own couch.
I mentioned this in the LRS piece … I mentioned it because men – and women – drank to excess back in the 60s, it was just a way of life. Men got drunk. Women got migraines.
And this is where the conundrum raised its hyenic head. And screamed at me.
I had apparently betrayed this man by telling the truth about him.
I hadn’t said he was a sober, even-tempered, witty, caring, loving, intelligent, articulate, gentle, thoughtful, generous, spiritual or even demonstrably loving person, because he wasn’t.
No. I’d taken the essence he showed to the world and depicted him on his couch with a glass of cider in his hand objecting in words of no more than four letters about a song on the radio.
That’s the way so many working class, drinking class, bad tempered class men were in the 60s. I never suggested he was a drunk or a bully. But so many men were way back then.
So, as a writer, a man who delves invited or uninvited in to other peoples’ live for a living – a man whose job has always been to challenge liars, cheats, thieves, conmen, politicians, businessmen, princes and kings – I was being ‘spiked’, edited by a member of my own family for telling the truth.
A truth they didn’t want to come out, despite the fact that this man who drank at home and had a vile temper was a secret all over the place. Also, let’s face it, he chose to be a drinking man and never bothered to address his vile temper.
A member of my family was asking me to tell lies about a man I hadn’t even insulted as far as I was concerned. Yet, he had insulted me all his life.
So, should writers write about the rights and wrongs in their own families?
I say yes.
It is honest.
And why should family not be looked at through the arrow of light in a prism?
Your life is made up of good and bad, angst and fear, love and loss, unfairness and luck … but it is also made up of the influences of those around you, the good, the bad and the ugly, the cousins, the uncles and the aunties, the vicar at the local church, the teachers and the lawyers.
Write about those who have done you good and those who did you wrong.
Tell the truth as a writer, always.
And never ever be afraid of showing the world about the truth of your life and of those who influenced you … these people are the teachers.
Those who need to know the truth about how their lives affected the lives of others.
And that’s the truth.
#writers #writing #honesty #truth #secretsandlies
