Near the end of my review of The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb, I mentioned that I was reluctant to read a fictionalized version of the horrific events that occurred at Columbine High School in 1999. In fact, part of the reason it took me so long to finish the book (and part of the reason it sat on my Kindle, unread, for two years before I added it to my list for the TBR Pile Challenge) was that the subject matter made me uncomfortable. It took some real effort for me to even define what exactly it was that made me uncomfortable. Works of fiction have always been written about historical events. Why was I having such a reaction to this one?

At first I thought it might be the nearness of the event. The shootings at Columbine were painfully recent. But I myself am incorporating an even more recent real-life tragedy, Hurricane Katrina, into my fictitious work-in-progress Jade, and while I want very much to honor the people who were affected by Katrina and their struggles, I don’t feel the same unease about writing about the hurricane as I did about Lamb writing about Columbine. The same is true for novels written about other contemporary events like 9/11 or the Iraq War.

So if it wasn’t how recent the horror had been, then what was it that made me uncomfortable? I thought about it for a long time and I finally decided it was the intimate nature of Columbine. Other real-life events, wars and natural disasters and terrorist attacks, affected thousands of people. Columbine, while it shocked and saddened the entire nation, was a small-scale event that only directly impacted a small number of people. Injecting fictitious characters into such a personal tragedy felt wrong to me, especially seeing as Lamb fictionalized other aspects of his story (the name of his protagonist’s hometown in Connecticut and the name of the women’s prison in that town). I understand why he fictionalized what he did (Lamb volunteers at the real-life women’s prison and has edited two books made up of inmates’ writings from his workshops there), but it made the use of a real world tragedy stand out even more.

My unease was mostly unwarranted, however. I thought the book was almost exclusively about the Columbine tragedy, with some historical fiction thrown in, but it is in fact more concerned with the aftermath of traumatic events in general, not just Columbine. When he does write about Columbine, he does so in a sensitive and responsible way. A lot of popular entertainment, especially movies, focuses on the traumatic event itself because that’s where the outward drama is. A battle or attack is much more spectacular than the aftermath. I’m interested in the effects of the traumatic event on a life, or on several lives, and so is Lamb.

One of the things I found interesting about Lamb’s approach was that even though he uses first-person narration, he doesn’t try to put that narrator directly into the horrific events in Columbine. His narrator, a teacher at the school, is not there that day, but his wife is. He witnesses the gruesome events at a distance, the way most of us did, but with a deeper level of knowledge of the people involved than the rest of us. He sees his wife’s suffering, and the suffering of others in the community, up close, but even as he mourns and strives to understand why this terrible thing happens, he does so more as an observer than a participant. At a public grief counseling session, he can’t go into the inner circle with those who directly witnessed the attacks. He stands outside, with the rest of us, looking in and not knowing what to do to help.

Lamb, it turns out, was also concerned about using the Columbine shootings in his novel. In the afterword, he asks the question himself: why did he use the real event instead f fictionalizing it? His answer:

First, I felt it was my responsibility to name the Columbine victims—the dead and the living—rather than blur their identities. To name the injured who survived is to acknowledge both their suffering and their brave steps past that terrible day into meaningful lives. To name the dead is to confront the meaning of their lives and their deaths, and to acknowledge, as well, the strength and suffering of the loved ones they had to leave behind. Second, having spent half of my life in high school—four years as a student and 25 as a teacher—I could and did transport myself, psychically if not physically, to Littleton, Colorado. Could I have acted as courageously as teacher Dave Sanders, who sacrificed his life in the act of shepherding students to safety? Would I have had the strength to attend those memorials and funerals to which I sent my protagonist? Could I have comforted Columbine’s “collaterally damaged” victims, as Caelum struggles to comfort his traumatized wife? The depth and scope of Harris and Klebold’s rage, and the twisted logic by which they convinced themselves that their slaughter of the innocent was justified, both frightened and confounded me. I felt it necessary to confront the “two-headed monster” itself, rather than concoct Harris- and Klebold-like characters.

Having read the book, which also touches on the second Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina and even the Civil War, I’ve come to terms with Lamb’s use of Columbine. I think he feels it is better to call these things by their true name rather than obscure them with a thin veil of fiction. If he fabricated a school shooting, we would all compare it to Columbine anyway. This way he can use the deep resonance of the real event to strengthen our connection to the characters. If art is supposed to help us make sense of the world, then art should be allowed to incorporate as much of the world as it needs to.

What are your thoughts? Have you ever felt uncomfortable about a real-life event being used in a work of fiction?

I’ve been doing the 250 Words a Day Challenge for a little over three months now, and I think I’m ready to call it a success. I went off the rails a little bit in May, but even with everything that got in my way, I still managed to write almost 5,000 words that month, at an average of 150 words a day. Both April and June were much better, coming in at over 8,000 words each. If I had been on my own, I probably would have written something during these three months, but nowhere near the 21,196(!) words I wrote because of the challenge.

The question now is, what next? Do I continue with the challenge, or move on to something else? Lucky for me, the answer fell right into my lap. After being away from Twitter for a while, I logged back on to see several writer friends posting with the hashtag #ROW80. A little investigating brought me to A Round of Words in 80 Days, a writing challenge that, as the tagline says, “knows you have a life.” You can set any writing goal you like, as long as it’s measurable. It’s longer and looser than NaNoWriMo, so I can continue with my work-in-progress, which I love (NaNo wants you to start a brand new novel, which can be frustrating if you’re in the middle of another work, which I almost always am).

So, here is my goal for A Round of Words in 80 Days: Write 3,000 words a week. This is roughly 500 words  a day, six days a week, but having a weekly count gives me more flexibility than a daily one. I still plan on doing the 250 Words a Day Challenge, I’m just hoping that some or even most days I write a lot more. That should total about 34,000 words, more than enough to finish outlining my work-in-progress, Jade, and start writing the first draft. The challenge runs four times a year, so if it works for me, I can carry Jade forward and finish the first draft during the next 80 days. That puts me right on target with my 2011 goal of finishing the first draft by the end of December. I want most of these words to be in my WIP, but posts written for this blog will count too.

The latest round started on Monday, July 4th, so I’m jumping in a little bit late. Fortunately, I’ve been a little bit of a tear this week, so even without being officially on board, I’ve written over 1500 words since Monday. Woo! I’m looking forward to keeping that up and to encouraging all my fellow ROWers along the way.

Real Quick Update (7/10/11)

I’m doing a real quick update for the July 10th check-in because it’s already July 11th and I should be in bed. I was panicking because I had it in my mind that I set 5,000 words as my goal and when I went back to check my progress I’d only written 4,412 words since Monday. I was crushed! Here I was thinking that I’d been doing well, and I hadn’t even met my goal. It wasn’t until just now that I said, “Wait a minute, wasn’t I planning on averaging 500 words a day, with one day off? That’s 3,000 words, not 5,000.” Sure enough, I went back and checked and my goal was 3,000 a week. So instead of being under, I’m almost 1,500 words over. Woo! What a relief.

I didn’t realize until I posed last week’s entry that I haven’t talked about Jade here before. I’ve been living with her in my head for so long (though not as long as Sable) that I forget that not everyone knows who she is.

Senior year of college I took a novel writing class which was basically a workshop, and, naïve as I was, I decided to present the brand new story I had been kicking around about a New York City detective who became involved with a mysterious woman, only to find that she wasn’t what she seemed when she disappeared. It was supposed to be a dark, psychological work that explored the idea that we never really know the people in our lives and so forth, but looking back on it, it was a horrible choice for that class. The first chapters especially were very Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins, all glitz and glamour and fabulous rich people. The class, on the other hand, was  Hemingway and Faulkner, literary fiction and gritty realism. They eviscerated me. I remember one woman coming to my aid and saying she didn’t think I had meant to write the kind of work they thought I was presenting, which was true, but it didn’t help. I came away feeling like I had been sliced to ribbons by Xacto knives, but I also came away with a directive: show us the dark. They wanted to see this mysterious woman’s past, what it was that haunted her. Never mind that doing so would ruin my plot—they thought my plot was crap. They wanted the grit, the real.

So I gave it to them. I came back with a first chapter that chronicled all the misery that was Jade’s life, and they loved it, except for the one student who thought it was clichéd that Jade was a heroin addict and a stripper. If I remember correctly, he wanted her to be a librarian. Everyone else in the class, including the professor, shot him down, although the character Maggie, who is a recovering addict and a librarian, was born out of that statement. Of course in real life anyone can become an addict. But Jade wasn’t anyone, and she darned sure wasn’t a librarian. I of all people would know that.

It’s interesting to look back on what I wrote of that original version (I’m a pack rat, so I still have a lot of my old writing) and look at what’s changed and what’s stayed. The three main characters in that original version were the detective, named Reece, an actress named Sabrina, and Jade. Reece went from being the main character to a peripheral one, then was sidelined as unnecessary before being brought back in this latest revision. Sabrina, who was the source of all the glitz and glamour in the first version, went from being an actress to a social worker, to finding herself on the chopping block. It’s hard for me to let her go because she was really the heart of the story for many, many revisions, but I’m afraid she no longer has a place in that world. As for Jade, she’s been as difficult for me to pin down as she was for Reece in that original version. She doesn’t seem to want to give me a straight answer on anything, which is part of the reason it’s twelve years (ugh) later and I still haven’t finished her story. I think I may finally be getting close, though, and working through the First Draft book should help. I guess we’ll see. Either way, at least now you’ll have an inkling who I’m talking about when I talk about her.