Category: Torg Life

Colonoscopy: Part I

Before I tell you about a recent colonoscopy procedure I had done, I want to tell you about an idea I have for a story that I’d call “Modern Medicine.”  There’s this guy (hmmm, this is starting to feel very autobiographical) who had blood in his stool a couple times.  He’s pretty sure that he can control this little unpleasant feature of his bathroom  life by altering his diet, but to be safe he visits his physician.  After a gushy lubricated rectal exam, the physician says that the character’s self diagnosis is likely accurate, but that he—let’s call this guy “Larry”—should have some blood work done and also visit a gastrointestinal (G.I.) physician.

For some reason (and here’s where the fiction begins) Larry thinks his insurance will cover the procedure but it doesn’t.  Or he’s between insurances (not a great explanation because if I were in this position I would not be going to the doctor for a “maybe”) and ultimately he receives a $400 dollar bill for the blood work, let’s say another $100 for the initial exam, another $200 for the specialist, and then conservatively, $2,000 for the colonoscopy.  Possibly the story ends with Larry happy to receive a clean bill of health but somewhat put out that he is a couple thousand dollars poorer.  There are of course alternative outcomes:  perhaps Larry is one of the approximately 3% of patients who suffers heavy bleeding or within the smaller percentage of people who suffer a perforation and require immediate major surgery.  This would illustrate my thinking that sometimes going to the doctor can send a perfectly healthy person spiraling down a steep hill where their snowball of wellness boulders into a mass of trouble.  Although according to various internet sources there seem to be 1 in 3,000 or 1 in 30,000 people who die from a colonoscopy, this wouldn’t have probably served my story very well.  An ending of death—plausible if not probable—would be seen by most as overly dramatic.  Up next—possibly as a warning to keep you away from this blog—will be the story of my actual procedure.

Real Life in Fiction

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.
–Stephen King, from On Writing

     In my short story “Eye Contact” a woman texts her husband a kiss “mphwaa,” (or something like that—I need Megan here to remind me of how to spell it) and then goes into a hotel and commits adultery.  This this string of letters meant to be a textual kiss is something that my real-life wife actually sends me.  This character in my story has my wife’s sister’s red hair, and probably her taste in shoes and handbags.  The character is also a pharmaceutical rep, a job that wife used to do, and a job that my buddy’s wife does now.  It’s a profession which I know just enough about that I might be able to lay down the relevant details neccessary to convince a reader to fall into what John Gardner called, “the fictional dream.” 

     My wife used to be a little obsessed—I think she’d admit—about who was who in my stories and what parts of the stories had actually happened to me.  I tried to explain this to her, but I think that it took her discovering the little details of our life in my stories for her to understand how it all worked, at least how it works for me. 

     If my stories were milkshakes, then here are some of the ingredients:  actual details of people I know and places I have been, situations I have personally experienced, heard about, or seen on the news, and everything I can dream up.  All of that gets tossed into a writing blender and eventually out comes a story, part real life, part imagination.  

     Among readers, I’m recognizing two poles: one pole is where strangers reside.  These are people who don’t know me and who have never been to Winamac, Indiana where I grew up, Bourbonnais where I went to college, or any place else I have lived.  These people read stories with no suspicions about what character might be who, as if each character has a real-life secret identity.  Somewhere between the poles are the people who know the writer just well enough to think they know who is who.  I think these people are the most dangerous when it comes to logical leaps off the wrong end of the boat dock.  They might see the coach in my novel Love on the Big Screen and think that my fictional man is the actual coach I had when I played basketball (mostly watched from the bench) at Olivet Nazarene University.  The truth is, I’ve known a lot of coaches (having been one for eight years) plus there are all those coaches I’ve watched from afar: Bob Knight, Bob Huggins, Rick Majerus, Rick Pitino, etc. and so when I write a coach, I’m thinking about what will serve the story that is unfolding before me.

     Opposite the pole where total strangers gather round, is the actual person who is rumored to be a character.  I have a friend with the last name Zaucha, a name I used in my novel for it’s capability of transforming into the nickname “Zuke.”  I wrote that friend and asked him if he was cool with me using his name.  If this friend thought the character was him, then he’d rightfully be able to say, “Bill has told a lot of lies about me.”  And if my book was nonfiction, he’d be right.  I used Zuke’s name for a reason I just shared.  The rest isn’t him and someone who says I’ve said X or Y about him would be wrong.

     What’s set me to thinking about this?  I think it’s been that I’ve got a few author’s visits planned, and some emails have come in about some of my stories. I can see that people are going to leap to conclusions about who is who in my books.  I’ve heard writers say they aren’t welcome in their hometowns anymore and maybe this is where I’m headed.  I don’t think it should be a surprise that my stories are often happening in the Midwest, that many of the details I can lay down are ones I’ve either witnessed, heard about or actually experienced—maybe for example powering that little boat I used to cruise the Tippecanoe River on—and so I’m hoping not to face too many accusations that a story like “Eye Contact” suggests that my wife is dying her hair red and sneaking into hotels.

Fear and Writing

A friend of mine wrote to me scared about an opportunity he has in that his girlfriend is going away for 21 days and he has practically the whole time to himself to write.  He’s wanted to write more but he suspects that he might instead sit around in his underwear, let the dishes pile up, and watch a lot of stupid television shows.  (if you laughed, his words)  There’s a lot in what he says that resonates a ping for me.
Let me start with fear.  I am more terrified today when I am about to write something new than I was when I got started trying to write everyday.  I think I know enough to know how badly I could screw everything up.  I’ve got Chekhov, Dubus, Ford, Boyle, and Chabon in my head and every sentence that I write is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich next to a Giada (see the Food Network) creation.   When I’m revising, no problem.  I’ve got something to work with and I can read it over and over, dink around with the sentence, chop paragraphs and put them back.  I can layer in images related to character or setting and cut what doesn’t add up to much.
As for my fear of the new sentence, I worked up a lot of what I’d call “warm ups.”  I read a poem or two from Poetry Magazine.  Since I’m not so smart there are always a few words I don’t know.   I look those up, log the definitions, and then I type in the context of the poem.  I try to look over one of those pages a day.  I don’t really learn the words as they pop up and surprise me once in awhile.  It was like that in basketball.  People who saw me play will laugh that I use this analogy.  I don’t know that I had moves in as much as I just tried to run past people and shoot.  But I think words and sentences pop out like dribbling moves on a baskteball court.  You drill and drill, you immerse yourself in the langauge, and then in the games (when you write for real) every once in awhile you surprise yourself with something new.
I’ve lost my way a bit from where I started here, but I keep telling myself that’s what I like about a blog.  I can be a little off my game, not pay total attention to my focus, but still find my way into something new to think about, find my way into 1 little bit about something I care about.  If you write, I wonder how you get going, I wonder if you’ve got half the hang ups as me that you must cling to in order to get started.