Unfortunate Son: Why We Classify Writing (But Not Music), by Paul Shirley

Several weeks ago, I wrote a story called The Most Important Event Of My Life.  In it, I tell of the meeting between two humans the reader assumes to be my parents.¹

One person, after reading my tale and telling me that she’d liked it², asked how I had known so much about how my parents met. My eyebrows shifted toward one another and I said, “Uh, I didn’t. I made up most of it.”

My reader’s face fell like someone who’d just had the Tooth Fairy explained to her. Then, because she didn’t want to hurt my feelings, she brightened and said, “Well, it was a good story anyway.”

Hers was not a unique reaction. Several people responded the same way.

When I wrote the story, I assumed that the reader would understand that it was mostly made-up, or, at best, only loosely based on how my parents met. I didn’t think anyone would accept a story written 40 years after the fact, about an event that occurred before I was born, as a faithful account of that event.³

¹An understandable mental leap, as I said “My father”, “my mother”, and “my life”.

²See what I did there?  People liked my story, so you should too!

³Granted, the reader could have thought I was relating a story passed down through family lore.  But that would have been even more reason to be skeptical – if your family is anything like mine, half the stories have been embellished multiple times; the other half were stolen from books your uncle Jerome read in the sixties.

The general thrust of my writing was true. My parents did meet because my mother was in my father’s class, my father had spent time in the Air Force, and their meeting happened at the University of Kansas.  To help the story along, I created dialogue, a fictitious best friend for my mother, and specific interactions that helped move the story to its conclusion: that my parents ended up together, in part, because my father wrote her a note.

But even if I had made up the entire story – would it have mattered?  Each of the readers who liked the story was moved by it, where “moved” means that it helped connect him or her with his own experiences or emotions, which is pretty much what non-technical writing is meant to do.⁴ So, as far as the story’s effectiveness goes, whether it was “true” or not is irrelevant.

Nonetheless, my readers felt betrayed.

⁴Here’s what David Shields wrote in his fragmented but thoughtful book, Reality Hunger, about memoirs, but which, I think, applies to all “non-fiction” writing:

The facts of the situation don’t much matter, so long as the underlying truth resonates.  Memoir is neither testament nor fable nor analytic transcription.  A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom.

I wondered why they felt betrayed.  As I did that wondering, I happened to hear the song “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.⁵

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no Senator’s son,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate son

A revelation came over me:

It is very possible that John Fogerty was a fortunate son.

⁵The song that got me thinking about this subject wasn’t “Fortunate Son”.  But I can’t remember which song it was and “Fortunate Son” proves my point pretty well.  (See, I did exactly what I’m talking about – the details of the story don’t matter; they’re not the point.)

We can document the fact that John Fogerty wasn’t a Senator’s son. But it is conceivable that he might have been a fortunate son. Or, if not a fortunate son, at least not the vagrant the song makes him – or whomever is the narrator of the story – out to be.

That is to say: John Fogerty wasn’t necessarily the “I” (or the “me”) in the song.

John Fogerty could have been – and very probably was – writing fiction when he wrote “Fortunate Son”.  But his music isn’t kept in a particular section of the library (or of FYE), subject to a choice between alphabetization and the Dewey Decimal System.  It’s just music.

We’re diligent about categorizing our books by whether they are fiction or nonfiction, but our music remains unfiltered.

Why do our brains need categories for what we read, but not for what we hear? Why do we not care, when we listen Axl Rose wail, if he is singing about a real-life experience during which he told a real-life bitch to real-life back off when he sings,

Back off, bitch.

To answer this question, I set out on a little research project.  I went on a mental walk through my own music library, hoping to figure out whether it mattered to me if the music I like is fiction or not, and whether I could even tell the difference.

She holds the hand that holds her down,

she will…rise above.

From Pearl Jam’s “Daughter”⁶, in which Eddie Vedder might be singing about one of the following: A child who feels like a failure, a parent who feels like a failure, or a parent who beats a child, unfailingly.⁷ Based on my limited knowledge of Edward Vedder’s life, I have to think that “Daughter” was not written to record a personal experience.  It is likely that a personal experience inspired the song, but it is just as likely that it was “enhanced” so that that experience would fit with music.

⁶Every time I hear “Daughter”, I think, Jeez, this song is boring.  Until the last half, when it gets awesome.

⁷Please don’t be one of those people who writes to tell me, “Actually, Eddie said in November of ’99 that “Daughter” was about…”  I don’t really care what it’s about.  I know what it seems to be about to me, and that’s sufficient for my enjoyment of it.  Thank you.

Elliott Smith, “Everything Reminds Me Of Her”:

So if I seem a little out of it, sorry.

Why should I lie?

Everything reminds me of her.

There are artists who affect personalities different from their own for their music. My sense is that Elliott Smith was not one of them.  The emotions are too raw; he’s too distraught.  It seems very much like he was telling the truth, or something close to it, if only because he sang really sad songs and then really killed himself.

Weezer, “Undone (The Sweater Song)”:

If you want to destroy my sweater,

Pull this thread as I walk away.

I suppose it is possible that Rivers Cuomo once had someone destroy his sweater by pulling “this thread”.  But I doubt it.

Linkin Park, “Lying From You”

First singer (Mike Shinoda): I can’t pretend I’m who you want me to be, so I’m,

Second singer (Chester Bennington): (Lying my way from you),

Shinoda: No, no turning back now,

Bennington: (I wanna be pushed aside so let me go).

I doubt anyone ever said, “I can’t pretend I’m who you want me to be,” and then had another guy pop up over the kitchen window and yell, “Lying my way from you!”

Thus, what we think to be non-fiction (They were really mad, Paul!) is more like creative non-fiction.⁸

⁸And 100% fantastic.  Seriously.  Do yourself a favor and throw away your built-in prejudice against Linkin Park and go back and listen to this tune.

The Drive-By Truckers, “Two Daughters And A Beautiful Wife”

He saw them playing there before him

What were they doing there?

It felt like home, It must be alright

Or is it just a dream?

Some of the Truckers’ work is obviously fiction – witness the three-song suite in The Dirty South that is based on the movie Walking Tall.  Other songs are probably fiction – my selection here is written in the third person and seems likely to be about someone other than Patterson Hood or Mike Cooley.  Still others – written as they are about the band’s home in Alabama – could very well be nonfiction.

Bruce Springsteen, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”

Well once she had a fella,

Once she was somebody’s girl,

And she gave all she had that one last time,

Now there’s a little girl asleep in the back room.

The Springsteen song “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is based on a Flannery O’Connor short story of the same name, which, undoubtedly, is based on some kernel of truth.

Or, fiction based on fiction that’s probably based on reality.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to order these songs based on their fictionality; I don’t know if the Drive-By Truckers are dealing in truth more than Pearl Jam.  What I do know is that it doesn’t much matter where the music I like comes from.  I don’t like Elliot Smith’s “Everything Reminds Me Of Her” more than Weezer’s “Undone”.  Each moves me in its own way.  I connect with a song not because it is true, but because it makes me feel, or think, or dance.

But that doesn’t settle my question.  Why is there no classification system?  Why didn’t Elliott Smith have to submit his album Figure 8 to his record label as either “fiction” or “non-fiction”?

For an answer, we need to go back in time.

Humans are used to music. We’ve been making it for tens of thousands of years.⁹ Consequently, we can classify – without even trying – audio information as it comes in. Our brains hear notes put together, in an order they know to be musical, and they think “Love song”. Not “news broadcast” or “dump truck driving over a pothole”.

We aren’t yet so good with the written word – we’ve only been writing for a few millenia. So, when we see words on a page, we’re easily confused. We can’t tell, based only on how those words are presented, if they make up an accounting of fact, an interpretation of fact, or a work of pure fiction. An email from a boss, detailing the new procedure for submitting payroll requests looks a lot like an email from a boss, detailing his weekend hijinks at Table Rock Lake. We have to read the words and then, using past experience as a guide, decide how to interpret what we’re reading. It doesn’t happen immediately, like it does when our brains make the call between Elton John and Dump Truck.

So, to help our overworked brains, we’ve created categories called “non-fiction” and “fiction”. These categories are crude and ineffective, mostly because they’re new. They’re the pit latrines of classification. Someday, we’ll work our way up to indoor plumbing, but someday hasn’t yet arrived.¹⁰ We’re still easily thrown. Given no help, our brains see writing like a petulant two-year-old sees a puzzle he can’t figure out.

Our brains won’t always be that way. Readers won’t always care if a story is completely true, partially true, or told from the perspective of a muskrat. In ten thousand years, when our species is able to classify writing without any help,¹¹ our descendants will look back and laugh at our underdeveloped brains.

By then, we’ll probably have a word¹² for writing that’s meant to be creative – writing that we recognize as non-technical and potentially moving – and we won’t care how exactly how creative, or exactly how true it is.

But we’re not there yet.  For now, we have only “fiction” and “non-fiction”.

While we wait for that new word (and for those 10,000 years to pass), Rivers Cuomo will get to write songs that might be true or might be not, safe in the knowledge that we’ll never question him because our brains are already wired to put music on a gradient of creativity – as opposed to on a teeter-totter, like we do for writing.

Until then, the Dewey Decimal System gets to stick around and writers will continue to confuse readers with truths, half-truths, and non-truths.

⁹Possibly longer.  But my sources show conservative estimates at “for 50,000 years”.  I didn’t want to exaggerate.

¹⁰Unless you ask John Fogerty.  According to him, Someday never comes.

¹¹…before going back to eating giraffapotamus ribs.  Because we’ll have crossed and domesticated them by then.

¹²I’m partial to “zweef”.

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