Artists are always trying to find a way to be honest, working at it, fighting to get past the layers to be raw and truthful and vulnerable. 

But what is this truth? How do we open up in our stories? And how do we even begin? 

I would argue that we don’t need to learn how to be storytellers, we need to unlearn and undo the work we try to put into telling a story—we need to get out of our own way. At the core of the stories we tell every day in text messages, in emails, spoken aloud to our family and friends we have all the tools. We run up to a friend and say, “Oh my god, I have to tell you what happened to me…” and the story comes out—with characters, dialogue, tension, setting—but when we try to write a story we shove and push all these elements in and it comes out so contrived. And when we say, “This story sounds written,” what we mean is that it rings false, untrue. 

But that’s the opposite of what most of us are trying to do in telling stories. What most of us are trying to do is reveal some aspect of truth, our truth, the truth in the world as we see it. To communicate the reality we perceive. 

Because this reality is subjective, the story that ignites in me, may not ignite in you.  In order to tell our truth, we cannot, we should not, worry about seeking out some universality. We are not trying to find a singular truth about the world but trying to understand ourselves by being honest. How do we do that? Vonnegut says what we should do is try to write to one person. That person can even be ourselves. And even if we are writing to this imaginary self, we should try to communicate and explain who we are and what we are going through and what it is like to be us, get past all the clichés and surface level introspection to the real complexity.

I have long thought that the benefit of fiction is that we get to live for a moment with and through someone else—we spend so much time in our own perspective locked inside, and for a brief moment fiction allows me to see what it’s like to be you. But the stories we are drawn to are the ones that are not so foreign, we are drawn to those which reconfirm that I am not alone, we are drawn to stories that feel familiar… therefore I’m not seeking another as much as I am seeking, through fiction, a sense of the familiar, a little bit of light, seeking myself. 

I am ostensibly writing about a story about a woman who is locked, barricaded in her room, terrified of knocks, phone calls, ignoring emails, exhausted by television, hiding from the people pushing and shoving their way into her home, her room, yet I have found a truth that feels so personal and familiar about a woman who hasn’t had her period in three months, who cannot eat, cannot shit, and seeing a bit of my own reality—and maybe because this story has nothing to do with being locked in a single room while others are knocking.

This story seems to me much more than that. There is a cognitive dissonance here in “Headache” where the character seems to me to both be wanting and begging for a connection and is ultimately appalled by herself and the idea that others dare to intrude on her life. The fridge is foreign, the food is spoiled, bodily functions won’t work the way they are supposed to (she wants to eat, or shit-- normal actions, but vomits instead), and finally when men come to rip her from her room she is most bothered by the dark figure who doesn’t say hello. 

But what I want you to pay close attention to is not that last line with its slight gesture toward humor as dark as the figure looming behind, because indeed the whole story is filled with these moments of humor. But if I can point you to that penultimate line when the whole story turns, like a camera panning, shifting from second person to first (breaking all rules of fiction) and we become the dark figure, or the dark figure speaks to us. I don’t know if it was the mirror which served as a catalyst but finally the narrator who has so far refused to face herself, sees a truth, and turns toward us in accusation.