Story telling

Many years ago I went to Hamilton for a weekend of Jewish learning. This was before we started Devarim in Wellington, a long time before Limmud in Auckland and Kia Torah in Wellington. It was organized by Norman Simms, an eccentric, challenging scholar ( I hope that he won't mind being described as such) I don't recall the topic of the talks apart from Norman talking about Mendel Beilis, the victim of the last Blood Libel in Kiev in 1913. I don't think that there was much Talmudic or any other rabbinic discussion, but it was a very pleasant weekend of talkfest. One of the guest speakers was Morris Lurie, Australian writer of 27th Annual Hippopotamus Race fame. His talk on writing must have clashed with something more topical or controversial, because I was the only one who turned up for it. Thus Morris and I had a one on one conversation about writing. The one thing that I remember form this conversation is that he said that a story, a work of fiction, must be true. I can't say in what sense it has to be true, because after all, fiction is made up. But Morris Lurie quoted the work of William Trevor, a fine stylist and good story teller, who had just published a new collection of short stories as an example of a story that was patently not true. I suppose that what he meant was that an event, an incident that caused a disruption, deflected from the natural flow of the story was artificial imposed on the story line. 

I think of this because I am struggling to explore a very short story I wrote a while ago. It came to me in the middle of the night almost as I wrote it down. It is about the experience of an old man who can no longer orient himself, who is suffering from a degree of dementia. To unpack this story I need to know more about his circumstances, his relationship with his son, perhaps also with his absent daughter, his life with his late wife, his sense of both loneliness and self-sufficiency. All this must seem true and not contrived. 

Why I bother working on this story I don't know. I gave up writing fiction some time ago. I have a folder of unpublished stories, none of them good enough, though some are better than others. They could be revised, I could look for a publisher or publish it myself on the Internet, but who cares. It is all vanity. Yet here I am, back to writing. It has no purpose. It will not bring me fame. It is like my violin playing. I just do it because I am still alive and for better or worse I can do it.