Lies I've Told And Written Down

One of Vunderkin (the one that's still home) was awake at 11:00 pm late night with no idea what to write for a three page paper that was due the next morning. I gave her all sorts of wonderful ideas, and it clicked finally that she would write about student protests in France versus student protests in America (which doesn't exist any more). The year she was there, the students would march out at a drop of a hat, or at the absence of a hat. The year I was boy journalist at high school paper we had a full blown anti-war demonstration and teach-in (1969) and I wrote a huge long article for the paper, interviewed the protesters, the kids hiding in a building nearby that were going to go beat the protesters up if they tried to take down the flag, the principal, and myself I think. Anyhow, I strolled down memory lane in the morning with the Vunderkin as she drove us to school about the bogus papers I wrote. I once wrote a paper in fifteen minutes before class started which was a ripoff from the Twilight Zone show I had watched the night before.

I don't really remember the particular episode, but as usual the teacher thought I was amazing and read it to the class. I was embarrassed. And was particularly embarrassed when one of the kids called me on it after class and said he had seen the same show last night.

I rewrote the intro to this once, in my own words, for my paper in English and was given a A and was told how brilliant I was. But I knew. I told the Vunderkin, my problem in High School was that I would read the critical studies of things we were supposed to be thinking about and realize that my diddley paper really wasn't going to say anything compared to what I was reading elsewhere.
The very first short story I ever wrote, around sixteen or seventeen, which everyone thought was a brilliant thing, was nothing more than an edited retelling of events of an afternoon and evening leading up to a party where I drank alcohol and acted stupid and it was sort of tied together with a metaphor stolen from Sherwood Anderson.
Fiction is really lying, children, about what you really did. I recently just finished a 70,000 word novel set in 1873 in Samoa, which was really about me in 1980 something in west LA when I was single, well, and a lot of other personal stuff thrown in to make it better.