“I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” Woody Allen from “Annie Hall”
I went to Writing Cabaret last night. After reading what I wrote about a character who…
- breaks up with hyper-normal boyfriend
- gets pregnant by a priest
- murders a rapist
- prays to be a nun
- sees visions
- throws a party with someone wild
- runs away to NYC to be a painter
- drops LSD and paints on the walls
- falls in love with a heroin junkie
…several participants came up to me afterwards to sympathize about my “experiences”. They assumed I wrote memoir.
I write fiction.
I told fellow writer/performer Tiffany what I’d done.
She said, “Oh but fiction is so hard.”
Nope. So much easier… much MUCH easier.
My life is limited. Fictional lives, unlimited. Though I hafta say, it felt dirty. Like I was cheating, the same at a writer’s conference when I won the Mark Twain Lying Award, named after Mark Twain because he famously said, “Never waste a good lie. You never know when you might need one.”
But ya gotta shake what you got. So be it.
Andrea Mock 
Andie –
Did I tell you that a similar thing happened to me at that Tuesday night event? At the time I was embarrassed because I felt that I had deceived people. Later on, other writers told me that I should be proud I created such convincing characters.
I think that most of the people who attend – older, Berkeley types – have led interesting lives AND are working on their memoirs, so they assume that others are too.
Caveat auditor.
But I didn’t tell them it was made up. I just said, “Yes, he knew that she loved him.”
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