"By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened [...] and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur, but that nonetheless help clarify and explain."
- From The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.
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My stage managing friend Kate told me once about the two different schools of acting. There is "method," which gets actors in the press all the time for their months of research and tales of completely immersing themselves into a character maintaining it on and off screen/stage. I should say that my knowledge of acting theory is limited to my four years of high school drama club and one semester of a "Acting for Non-Theater Majors" at NIU, so forgive me if I butcher this theory. But from what I gather, method acting requires one to do as much as they can to become a character externally and internally.
Then there's the Brechtian theory, which seems to underplay that kind of immersion. Sure, mind exercises, meditations and research are valuable tools, but no matter what, there are always two people onstage - the character and the actor portraying the character. In the end, it's someone onstage, pretending to be someone else. (Hey actors, I'm not saying that what you do isn't incredible. I'm not saying it doesn't take a high level of skill and talent to do what you do. Let's just call a spade a spade. A painter makes pretty pictures. A writer puts words on paper.)
The latter came to mind upon reading the above quote from Tim O'Brien. It came from a piece of fiction based on his real-life experiences fighting in the Vietnam War. O'Brien blurs the line between fiction and truth by naming all the characters after people he served with and, in passages like the one above, breaking the fourth wall and admitting that certain things are exaggerated. In The Things They Carried, there are two O'Briens; the one who writes the stories drawn from his war experience, and the one in the stories.
When discussing the book in a writers group at my local library, other writers described how when they wrote memoirs on particularly hard or tragic events in their life, they too were able to separate themselves from the incident and look at it from a neutral position, because their trauma had been turned into story, something they could poke at, tweak and craft into something emotionally true, even if it's not one-hundred percent factual. Before, I had believed that writing creative nonfiction required a more method approach, and would try to mentally inhabit a past-self when I wrote. But O'Brien, and apparently the rest of the writers group, seems to fly in the face of that notion. Writing about the past isn't the same as writing history or journalism. The only thing that needs to be cited in memory, and is there anything more fickle and random than memory?
I finish this with another quote from Mark Twain; "It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."
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