Why Fiction Writers Write

I believe that fiction writers select topics—and genres—because of an inner need to explore the topic in more detail.  Simple, but complex.

Fictionalizing a real event—or real people—can be painful to the real person, and most certainly to the relatives and loved ones of that person. It is often said that a writer writes about what he or she knows.  I say that is not true. He writes about topics and subjects he finds intriguing.

I suppose there are as many answers to that question as there are writers. But generally speaking, I believe that fiction writers select topics because she or he has an inner need to do so. I'll give you two examples:

A marine platoon is halfway across a beach in the Eastern Pacific. A land mine explodes. One person remains alive.  If that one person were you, how would you cope?

You’re a train engineer, distracted by a firecracker going off on the tracks. You take a curve too fast and twenty-five people die when the train derails. Can you move past your guilt?

How do we, as humans, ever recover from such tragedies? That is the question that prompted me to write Out of the Depths. 

What are your thoughts?

David

The story of Out of the Depths

The year is 1945.  Russian Army trucks, their flags snapping in the frigid air, roar through the gates of the Birkenau concentration camp. Camp guards scatter, some exchange places with prisoners, but most simply shed their uniforms and disappear. Prisoners, mostly walking skeletons, are collected and given food. Unfortunately, their starved bodies can’t handle the nourishment and many die from their inability to digest real food. Chaos reigns.

Those who do survive eventually make their way to misplaced person’s camps and then on to rehabilitation facilities to begin the long road back to organized society. All carry emotional scars that will remain with them throughout their lives. Many of these folks have preserved their stories in taped interviews, and many have been unable to share anything. One can only imagine the pain and suffering they have silently carried.

But to me, the remarkable thing is that any of them can laugh, can enjoy life.  What a tribute they are to the human condition.  What inspiration they give the rest of us who can only think we understand what they experienced.

Out Of The Depths is a fictional account of one man who survived. And he survived interment for years when few prisoners managed to stay alive more than eight months.  If the gas chambers didn’t kill them, starvation did.

This story revolves around survivor’s guilt. I first came into contact with survivor’s guilt when I was about 14 years old.  I sat fascinated when one of my father’s truck drivers, a marine who had survived several bloody battles in the Western Pacific, perhaps at Iwo Jima, perhaps at Tripoli, told me how he was walking across the beach when every man around him fell to the sand dead.  He told me how he ran to another group of marines and continued his march toward the enemy only to have everyone of those men on his new company fall dead around him. Why, he asked, begging for an answer, did he survive when hundreds, perhaps thousands, died that day?

Of course I had no answer. I still don’t.  But a seed was planted. Out of the Depths is the tree that grew from that conversation, helped along by stories of survival from concentration camps survivors and others.  Originally, I tried to understand the experience of being a Jew in Nazi Germany by creating a family, with a son and daughter, and tying to imagine how they lived before Hitler, during Hitler, and after Hitler.

That was my first draft. It was long. It depicted life in rural Germany and life in the camp. It then went on to the rehabilitation center and how Bernard Helgman, the central character, managed to get himself through it and to the US. He then goes through surgical training and onto his life as we find it in the book now.

The only problem being that I had never been to Germany, to the concentration camp or to rehab. And I didn’t know anybody who had. For my purposes the writing had solved whatever reason it was that I undertook to write it, long before the Internet. So I tossed out everything except for the survivor’s guilt and the devastation that caused to Helgman’s life.  That, to me, was the essence of the story I wanted to tell.  A story that we all, I believe, can relate to.

Forty Years in the Making

I completed the first draft of this story well over forty years ago.  At that time a publisher had selected for publication.  I was subsequently informed by my agent that the book, then titled Generation After, had been removed from the publication list because, “The public is not ready for stories dealing with the Holocaust.”

Life being what it is, I had a few friends read the story before I buried the manuscript in the proverbial sock drawer where, from time to time, I pulled it out, revised it, sent it to publishers and buried it even deeper.

I have often asked myself why I wasn’t more persistent in pursuing publication.  I don’t know the answer to that question with any sense of accuracy, but here goes.  I start with the proposition that I shouldn’t publish a story about the horrors of the Holocaust without having street creds with respect to the subject. 

As I have noted before, my family blessedly escaped the atrocities and what I actually know has come from reading and listening to survivors who have been willing to tell their stories.  Forty years ago there were not so many people willing or emotionally able to tell their stories, accordingly much of what Bernard Helgman (my fictitious character) experienced in the camp is pure imagination.  Life in the camps was so horrible as to defy even the most active imagination, and so I have been reluctant to pursue publication because I don’t want to trivialize the Calamity. 

Out of the Depths, while entirely fictional, deals with one person’s anguish over what he did in the camp in order to preserve his own life.  This anguish is manifest after his release and affects everyone who knows him. (taken from David's notes)

Elie Wiesel

Posted by Pat McGrath Avery

"Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust." From Night by Elie Wiesel

With the release of Out of the Depths, David has brought a Holocaust issue to my mind - survivor's guilt. As I've focused on his character, Dr. Bernard Helgman, I've tried - unsuccessfully - to put myself in his shoes. What he endured and tried to forget is beyond my imagination.

This morning I read about Elie Wiesel's death. I read his book, Night, years ago. It was my introduction to the horrors people suffered in the Holocaust. He brought it to life. His contribution to society is immeasurable. He made the world aware of the atrocities that one group of humans can inflict on another. I wonder how many millions he influenced. Did we learn anything or will we allow history to repeat itself in another time and place?

The world has lost an outstanding writer and the Holocaust victims a passionate voice. We mourn his passing but thank God for his life.

I've read several blog posts about him. They too mourn his death. Mindy Phillips Lawrence asks soul-searching questions in her new blog, http://thoughts-like-clouds.blogspot.com.

Post by Pat McGrath Avery

Joyce Faulkner and I have worked with numerous veterans over the last fifteen years. We have found many common threads among them. One of the most frequently found is a lingering sense of guilt - because they survived when others in their unit didn't or because someone else was injured or killed for something they did or didn't do.

How many people do you know who carry a sense of guilt? Maybe the woman who was molested or raped and feels that in some way it was her fault - or the abused child who knows he had to do something bad to be repeatedly beaten by his dad (or mom). Maybe it's the person who survived a car wreck or another accident when everyone else died - or the fireman that couldn't save that child.

Whatever the situation, guilt consumes them. I think we all know guilt at some level. It influences our lives in so many ways. In Out of the Depths, David explores a person haunted by guilt for the things he did to survive his years in a Nazi concentration camp.