buffer-overrun

“Unguardedly honest and painful confessions between people who have just met are forced and false” -Robert McKee, “Story”

This is why so much of what I read is memoirs by women and gay men.

Because this relationship both to secrets and to what you can assume the reader will know does not in any way reflect my experience as a human or my experience in writers’ groups.

The vast majority of stuff that I would consider common knowledge (or at least would expect of someone who reads the newspaper) about sex, drugs, and various subcultures is totally baffling to a group of Boston area women age 50-70.

Also think of the amazing meet ugly between Wade and Vanessa in Deadpool, where it becomes a competition of trauma and gallows humor. Though I would agree that these are not the kind of secrets that drive plots. In Deadpool, the secret that drives the plot is Wade’s inability to face the vulnerability of someone caring for him while he is dying.

Or the boyfriend I met when I was 23 who when I told him I used to shoot heroin was like, yeah, I pretty much assumed that. But he was shocked when he saw how nice my father’s apartment was, because I was trying so hard to survive without my parents that I didn’t act like a rich girl.

I love characters who are trying to pretend that everything’s fine while it is really clear to the reader and most of the other characters that they’re a fucking mess. And those characters often have secrets that they wield in various ways and secrets that they try desperately to keep but that are obvious or mundane to people around them.

So, yeah, experiment with telling as little as you can get away with. But also you need to have a piece workshopped or betaed to actually figure out what is confusing people. And then write a really long version and keep rewriting it until it’s one or two amazing sentences. Show don’t tell doesn’t work for othered groups the way it works for straight white men.

I also love the idea (which I haven’t tried) of squeezing exposition in in the form of mansplaining.

“Unguardedly honest and painful confessions between people who have just met are forced and false” -Robert McKee, “Story”

Okay, so, I don’t really have an argument with this as writing advice. It is extremely hard to get information across in a compelling way. Even if you make the exposition plausible (therapist, support group, voice over) it’s not necessarily interesting. Though, there’s a difference between screenwriting and prose, which has a lot more room for rumination, reminiscences, etc.

But, I think, in real life, unless someone is severely impaired in some way, anything that they come right out and tell you isn’t a deep dark secret; it’s part of their public persona. So, even if an outsider thinks that a certain revelation is totally unacceptable, it is probably following some finely tuned in-group standard of appropriateness. Which, yeah, still isn’t an excuse for shoehorning in a massive exposition dump.

But the idea of a West Coast style of oversharing seems really dated to me, or maybe a holdover from a previous generation.

I lived in Cambridge in the early-to-mid 90s, and heard a lot about how much Bostonians hated San Francisco, because everyone was fake and pretended to be your friend. And, there were definitely some striking cultural differences between the two cities. In Boston, a lot of socializing happened in people’s homes, and you usually needed a personal introduction, someone to vouch for you. And there was an active distrust of casual acquaintances, people you’d just seen around. (Though one old timer told me that there had been much more of street culture in the 1950s and 60s before Scollay Square was torn down.)

But in Berkeley and San Francisco, maybe because of the military bases, the huge student population, the history of migration, or maybe just the nice weather, there was a vibrant cafe culture. And an expectation that people would be flirtatious and casually friendly, a kind of interaction that would have seemed very intimate to someone from Boston, but in the Bay Area was understood more as a form of politeness.

I think the differences have evened out a lot in the last 20 years, but every time I go back to visit my father in San Francisco, it takes me a while to stop feeling like everyone is flirting with me.

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It’s really unclear if McKee is talking about bad writing or people who piss him off at cocktail parties when he says, “Unguardedly honest and painful confessions between people who have just met are forced and false.” Like, is oversharing gauche, or is it unrealistic, or I guess, unrealistically gauche?

And, like, the stoic noir antihero whose deep dark secret is that the bad guys killed his girl is also pretty formulaic and unrealistic.

But also, that quote just kicked off this whole train of thought for me about what a secret is. Like, no matter how shocking or shameful something is, once it enters the repertoire of stories that you tell people, it’s not exactly a secret anymore. Maybe something more analogous to being closeted, something that a select group of people know, but that you need to keep out of the official record.

And of course the stories that you tell, even the shockingly intimate ones, have a function or many simultaneous functions. And maybe in ancient history it was “to validate themselves one to the other as authentic Californians” but it sounds like, even then, something else was going on, and McKee was just misinterpreting it.

I also think that people’s actual deep dark secrets aren’t necessarily what an outsider might think they should be.

I think the only time I’ve seen my father choked up was when he talked about how he’d never really dealt with his brother’s death, and that it still felt really raw, even after 25 years. Which, like, dude, not a secret. But he is constitutionally incapable of talking about emotions, so I guess for him, it was a big secret.

Or, the first time I did heroin and I got all loose and confessional, and the big secret I told Lila was that I’d been a super picked on nerd in middle school. Which, like, probably true for most people.

But I feel like I am particularly bad at the rules of when you tell secrets. Or, like, what is supposed to be a secret in each context? For a long time I was wearing one of Michael’s earrings, I guess as a sort of widow’s ring. And, at a party, one of Tobias’s friends told me he had the same earring, and I told him it was from my boyfriend who’d died, and he looked at me like, Why the fuck would you say something like that? and laughed nervously.

I’m probably just defensive, because my writing and my entire life online is pure oversharing.