How Do We Categorise What We Write?

On the application form for the course, we were asked to check a box indicating which discipline we most identified with: poetry, fiction or non-fiction. At the time, such delineation suited me very well; I still held fixed ideas on what writing was and how to describe and categorise it. I drew a fat red cross in the fiction box.

Not long after, during that same course, I discovered there was something in between fiction and non-fiction called narrative, or creative non-fiction. A new category! Great! I thought and started writing flowery, lyrical essays instead of short stories. But fiction still beckoned me to her, so I tried again, approaching it from the opposite direction: writing stories based on myself, rooted in my life and the lives of those around me. I categorised these pieces according to whichever writing class I happened to have an assignment due for.

Around the same time, Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory came out. After seeing the film, and listening to Almodóvar talk about it, I first came across the term autoficción. The film follows an ageing, ailing Madrid-based director, heartsick at the prospect that he may be too ill to keep writing and making films. For him, writing is both a therapy and a way to forget himself; faced with the possibility of no longer being able to create, he experiences an intense emotional crisis. Does any of that sound suspiciously like the film director might, in fact, be Almodóvar himself?

And then there is this:

Cinema has become my life. I don’t mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.” — Pedro Almodóvar

Interesting! I thought. So I’m allowed to do both – make fiction from non-fiction, or the other way around or perhaps a little of everything. Which is what I did from then on.

(As I first heard the term autoficción in Spanish, I took it to mean “self-fiction”, which isn’t everyone’s definition of auto-fiction. In any case, it’s interesting how much has moved on since the time I’m writing about here 2019. Now we have terms like “non-fiction novel” and, an eternal personal favourite, “fictional essay in 29 tangos”, making a lot of what I’m saying here kind of (happily) redundant.)

Using Our Own Lives as the Fabric of Our Work

Many years later, things had progressed. I wrote a story about Almodóvar called ‘The World Plus the Work’. In it, he is called The Director and the protagonist – obsessed with artists and their work stalks him through Madrid using Pain and Glory as a map, eventually staging an art heist that strips The Director of all his assets (assets the protagonist knows he has because she has seen them in his autoficción films). I should say that the story sits firmly in the fiction category! But it is also concerned with ideas that interest me, in particular artists who use their own lives as the fabric of their work and the effect that, in turn, has on their audience:

… in Pain and Glory, The Director uses his own life as source material. He appears to film outside his own home and possibly inside too. I respect his commitment to his medium. I really don’t think he will mind what I’m planning to do. Once it’s all over – when he has had time to view it all from a different angle – I think he will see my actions as a work of art in themselves … I’m going to take his art from him, the art he purchased with the money he made from the art he created. The art that helped create me. It’s all quite logical really.

The Double Nature of the Author

In Margaret Atwood’s book on writing Negotiating with the Dead, there is a chapter on duplicity and the slippery, double nature of the author – there is the writer and its attached human being. The writer does the writing; the human does the real-life things associated with writing, like book tours or simply the stuff associated with living itself, like eating or caring for people, or getting all that hair out of the shower plug hole. This makes a lot of sense and the delineation feels nicely manageable.

But, as Atwood points out, a writer is nothing if not unruly and unpredictable and thus unlikely to respect such boundaries. Which is to say: the writer is prone to wonder about its own doubleness and likely will want to write about it. Atwood uses Borges’s ‘Borges and I’ as an example. In it, the author splits himself in two, speaking both as the writer and: ‘The other one, the one called Borges … the one things happen to.’ The story, or essay, or short philosophical exploration, ends with the line: ‘I do not know which of us has written this page.’

Atwood’s book was published in 2002, so Almodóvar and his latterly more autobiographical films don’t feature. Not that I’m even sure where in that logic diagram he would appear anyway, probably sploshed all over it, like artist he is. But, his latest film, Amarga navidad, which came out in March, takes the writing of yourself – as artist – into your art to a whole new level.

The Ethics of Turning One’s Own (And Others’) Pain Into Art

The film follows Elsa, an advertising director who buries herself in work after her mother’s death. Running parallel to her story is that of a filmmaker writing a script that he isn’t happy with, until he begins to write about his assistant, whose life almost exactly mirrors Elsa’s. The film culminates in an argument between the filmmaker and his assistant, as the two story threads join in exploring creative crisis and the ethics of turning one’s own (and others’) pain into art. If all writers are double, then what happens when the writer half starts to cannibalise the human half in this way? Amarga navidad takes autoficción, coupled with the writer’s duplicitous nature, into a dizzying new realm. It went beyond more straight-forward autobiography and into something so meta it was hard to get my head around (though please bear with me because I’m about to try).

What I did sense were the parallels with my own interests. I thought about the story I had written about Almodóvar and felt – not un-creepily- like I had been, likely still was, writing myself into his life somehow, or that: He was writing about himself writing about being an artist and I was writing about him writing about himself. Meanwhile the narrator of my fiction – a version of me – was preoccupied by many of the same questions. By that point I no longer knew who was observing whom.

The Urge to Write When It Descends

I originally called this essay ‘Compulsively, Badly, Hopefully’ after another passage in Atwood’s book that describes the urge to write when it descends. I’d already experienced that compulsion, but it wasn’t until Pain and Glory came out, that I understood the other one: the compulsion of the author to cannibalise its human. And what does happen? The same thing that always happens, either way: stories emerge. And that’s that – everything and nothing.

As both a writer and an editor, I find myself returning to these questions repeatedly. Most manuscript sits somewhere on a spectrum between invention and lived experience, and part of the pleasure of working with writers is helping them discover where their particular story wants to be.

And, as for my two halves, I still don’t know how to categorise myself, but I do know that I’m at my happiest, when writing, if I can chew off a bit of my own arm. And occasionally someone else’s too.