Chrisonomicon

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

The past two weeks can be better summed up as fourteen days of making connections, as friends met family, family met dates, dates met roommates, and roommates met friends; it was a swirling microcosm of atomic collisions. My aunt and uncle had driven out from Arizona, so we went to breakfast one Sunday at the omelet bar around the corner that looks out over the Front Range, entertaining Mike and Trelita, who I discovered is a grad student up in Cow Town studying English lit.

We talked about a creative non-fiction class she's taking, which fired up my curiosity since the majority of my journaling takes advantage of a few fiction-writing devices -- narrative point of view, theme, setting, etc. -- and then earlier today on the commute to work I was thinking about writers like Jeremy who are adept at capturing the intrigue of everyday life without relying on the same techniques, and I wondered if the reason I resort to the fluff and fireworks of fiction is that I don't (currently) have the post-/pre-dating angst or bar excursions or anything else read-worthy to record.

Back in my high school machine shop where we held meetings for the school newspaper, I remember my first submission as a journalist: a well-received piece modeled on a bit I'd found in the local anarchist rag. But the credit with which I'd been lauded was leaden with the disappointment that I hadn't thought of the story first and I carried that disconcertion with me throughout my reporting career, turning it into a kind of spur that would dig into my side whenever inspiration refused to strike. I found solace in editing, but I know the burden that journalists bear, the burden that pushed New York Times journalist, Jayson Blair, and others like him to commit acts of fabrication and plagiarism.

Over the years, I've received one or two emails mentioning the fictitious feel of my writing and questioning the authenticity of my accounts. My responses have bordered on Zen, countering with whether it really matters if what I write is true in the first place. There's a certain level of trust built here on the internet, a trust that is often unfounded but that affords writers like me opportunities to experiment and produce work that would be otherwise brushed off by those in the bona fide profession. In the real world:

Journalism, even the creative kind, is built on lots of things, but trust wouldn’t top my list. Good journalism is built on passionate inquiry, indefatigable pursuit of evidence, healthy skepticism, obsession for accuracy, and a near-pathological fear of error—a determination to get things right no matter what it takes.

Journaling is nothing like journalism, as it demands only what truth the writer chooses to expose. Open to an audience, however, writing takes on an entirely different feel as that journalistic instinct returns, along with obsessions over accuracy and creativity and I spur myself onto higher, unexplored valleys of thought. And even though it's not assumed, a level of trust can be rewarding if maintained by adhering to solid journalistic decorum. This is where a part of my insecurity stems, as I attempt to balance the importance of recording the blunt, often plebeian truth with the desire to maintain a level of interest and intrigue, and of course without resorting to gossip or pornographic detail (truth being less of a concern than the substance of the message itself in either case).