Michael Dean Clark

This is the third of four entries on “being” a writer. The first can be found here and the second here.

True story: when I applied to graduate school, I was asked why I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. I said it was because I wanted to be a better liar. I got in and four years later I am about to be awarded that degree.

I am, I think understandably, conflicted about this. In essence, people will now refer to me as “Dr. Clark” (a term I think will still indicate respect because I will never be an HMO-funded health care provider) and a university has entrusted me with students to influence because I achieved a dubious goal. I improved my ability to deceive.

Sure, sure, you can parse words and say “it’s not lying, it’s fiction.” But the best fiction carries that one key caveat: people want to believe it. Or, as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, “People do not believe in lies because they have to, but because they want to.”

A note before I continue – I love the lies of fiction, when they point toward a truth worth exploring. Lies expose truth, much as “the shadow proves the sunshine.” But, within me is an existential dilemma. How does one lie ethically without crossing over into James Frey territory or worse, begin to enjoy the lies more than the truth they point to?

Some might call this classical conditioning. Lies are a slippery slope that lead from Thomas Jefferson’s “He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual” to Austin O’Malley’s “Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind” to (with apologies to Stephen Swanson) Adolph Hitler’s “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”

Lies, as we’ve all experienced personally, are a cage full of horny rabbits.

How then can one be “possessed by the truth” and a writer of good fiction? Again, I return to the views of people more intelligent than me. Some, like A.A. Milne, point with humor to the work that goes into lies with purpose when he wrote “If one is to be called a liar, one may as well make an effort to deserve the name.” Emerson went the sublime route, saying “Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.” Some, like Clare Boothe Luce, take the pragmatic view: “Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego and lessens the frictions of social contacts.” Plato used reverse psychology (before reverse or psychology were in vogue) “They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.”

Here’s my thought – fictional lies have limitations in spiritual truth. When they tie into the “greater than me,” they cease to be lies and become reflections of the walls of our caves. The argument could be made that this is transubstantiation of a sort. Inventions become actualities. This, of course, demands that one believe there is truth external of one’s own experience, a concept some consider as dated as high-waisted jeans on men. But I tend to agree with Karl Barth’s idea that “Man can certainly keep on lying…but he cannot make truth falsehood. He can certainly rebel…but he can accomplish nothing which abolishes the choice of God.” And when the presence of discoverable truth combines with the desire to find it, the lies of fiction make sense.

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and is in the final stages of earning a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. His work is set primarily in his hometown of San Diego and has been known to include pimps in diapers, heroin-addicted pastors who suffer from OCD, and possibly the chupacabra.

Michael Dean Clark

This is the second of four entries on “being” a writer. The first can be found here.

I had a job interview recently in San Diego and while I was there I got a chance to have dinner with my sister Jeanette. She’s in the middle of reading my first novel length manuscript and spent a good ten minutes before the food came trying to confirm which real people from our past were basis for my characters.

Tommy is totally Rob Machado.

Nope.

Well, Craig is you, isn’t he?

No, I see myself more as Bibs. (I should note that most people who’ve read the book think Craig is my alter, so they may be right. However, it really throws them when I say I identify more with Bibs, a deacon’s daughter turned prostitute and right-hand woman of the local pimp/drug dealer Marley Bob).

Well, what about BT?

She got him right, sort of. By the end of the conversation, I realized I really like this game. As a writer, I freely admit I crib the lives of the people around me. If you know me, I’m probably going to use a part of you. Writers don’t invent, we compile and alter and then graft what we’ve taken onto the pieces of ourselves we put into every person we “create.” We mix and match like the socks we don’t think people will ever see us wearing.

But the conversation of “who” my characters are is really interesting to me because I generally don’t know who I’ve composited until it gets pointed out to me. I think that may be one of the reasons I choose to do something as frustrating and low-paying as write fiction without wizards or vampires. I like the way something so personal only makes sense to me when other people explain its facets as they see them.

I even like when people get my stories “wrong” because explaining my intentions has a similar effect. I guess I could never be Emily Dickinson. I can’t write for myself and my four walls. I need feedback earlier than a posthumous release would allow.

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and is in the final stages of earning a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. His work is set primarily in his hometown of San Diego and has been known to include pimps in diapers, heroin-addicted pastors who suffer from OCD, and possibly the chupacabra.

Michael Dean Clark

This is the first in a series of four entries on “being” a writer.

I’ve spent the last four years completely committed to becoming a published author and yet only recently come to terms with calling myself a writer when people ask what I do for work. Even though I’ve written since I was young, saying it out loud (and claiming it as a vocation no less) has always felt a bit presumptuous and a lot bougie. And then there’s the inevitable follow-up question:

What’s your book called?

Um, I don’t have one. Until a couple years ago, I didn’t have a single fiction credit to my name. The awkward moment that follows generally ends with another question, or really, variations on the same question:

So what do you really do? Oh, so what’s your day job then? So, writing’s a hobby then? Where does your money come from?

Since drug sales and exotic dancing don’t seem to be acceptable answers to those questions, I’ve been obliged to tell people I teach writing and am working on a terminal degree (anyone else think that a Ph.D. and cancer sharing an adjective is odd?). And then the nod comes. You know, the head bob that says, Oh, you’re a loser.

Recently, however, I’ve had a couple pieces published and some “encouraging” agent rejection letters. As a result, I find myself described in a new way. Now, I’m not a loser, I’m an “emerging writer.” I am troubled by this title as well. Am I a grizzly rolling out of months of winter hibernation? Am I a developing nation? The consensus seems to be that I’m somewhere between caterpillar and butterfly, which in my estimation makes me that nasty, gray chrysalis from which a living creature may or may not spring.

If you think I’m wrong, try out the following:

Sir, you’re going to need triple bypass heart surgery. But don’t worry; one of our brightest emerging surgeons will perform the procedure.

I know you’re on trial for murder, but you’ve got an emerging public defender representing you.

When I think about the idea of emergence, I immediately want another title. I’m trying a few out. Tell me what you think.

I am under-published. I am material heavy and publication light. I’m very market selective. My readership is still on an indie level. Commercial success isn’t all that important. My family likes some of what I write and you should too. If I’m not the next “it” writer, I feel safe saying I could be the next “that” writer.

That last one seems a bit long and probably wouldn’t go over well on a resume. Maybe the one before it too.

I guess I just want to feel less like a fraud when I call myself a writer. Then again, if great novelists like J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee, and Lauren Conrad from The Hills never settled comfortably into the title, maybe I shouldn’t expect too either.

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and is in the final stages of earning a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. His work is set primarily in his hometown of San Diego and has been known to include pimps in diapers, heroin-addicted pastors who suffer from OCD, and possibly the chupacabra.