“We can’t help him.” I listed reasons on my fingers. “He’s lying to us, he’s coming to our house every day, our guests don’t feel safe. We’re the Eastown suckers, and he’s scamming us and scaring our girlfriends.”
“So we ignore him? Stop being generous?”
“We have to.”
My housemates and I argued back and forth, all of us remembering last night, when Kenny climbed into our back yard and banged on our window because we had continued eating dinner instead of answering the front door.
“We can’t help him,” I repeated, worn out from hours of barely civil discussion.
“I know,” my housemate finally admitted. “But it makes me feel like shit.”
*
This was two years ago, when my housemates and I faced a homeless man’s increasingly aggressive requests. I did not actually know if he was homeless—he wove a web of stories too tangled for me to deduce his real living situation—but the term “homeless” came easy when I was describing my predicament to friends or asking mentors for advice. With one word, I could summon a fairly accurate image.
But I felt almost as bad about that as I did about turning Kenny away.
Part of me rages every time I toss out “homeless man” or “New Ager” or “veteran” in lieu of a three-minute description. It reduces people to a stereotype, and a loaded stereotype at that. Does your vision of a New Ager involve a woman with flowing hair, whisping around a house full of crystals while Enya plays in the background? Or does it bring to mind a former ski bum, now working in a lumberyard and dirt biking in his free time? If I’m talking to you about a New Ager, I’m probably referencing the latter.
But I will be relaying his theories about meditation or the Illuminati, or passing on information about the aliens who evidently gave the pyramids to the Egyptians and control tectonic plates with a giant electro-magnetic device buried beneath the Sphinx, so I’ll skip the part about skiing and dirt biking and stick to “New Ager.” The two-word image works—it quickly gives you a context and a reason for his beliefs, and it does not waste your time with irrelevant details.
For the sake of the story, I sacrifice the person.
*
“He’s a drug addict, now,” one church lady whispers to another.
She shakes her head and clucks. “I always wondered about that boy.”
“He shouldn’t have moved away. You heard about the Smiths’ son—he did the same thing. Went to California and started doing drugs.”
But what drugs? And how long had he been hooked? Does he deal, or just use? Has he tried rehab; does he want to get clean? And—probably the most important question—why?
I want to answer them all. I can’t lump the car crash victim with an accidental pain killer addiction into the same category as a heroin junkie who pawns stolen TVs and old women’s jewelry. And bigger than that: one problem does not define a person. I want to learn about the church lady, too—push her out of that stereotype and find a real person. But if I follow that train, I’ll have to learn about the friend who gave the Smiths’ son his first joint, and about the alcoholic father who turned the church lady against all mind-altering substances. If six degrees of separation holds true, it won’t take long until I’m chasing seven billion life stories.
To avoid the impossible, I sacrifice the person.
*
Stephen King, in On Writing, advises, “The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest. Long life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.”
I cannot argue with Stephen King.
So when I write or tell a story, I trim people’s histories. And I trim more than that. People’s present stories have boring parts, too; and on the opposite side, they have complex traits that would burst my word limit. The more minor the character, the worse it goes. Fleeting ones—the cop who says one line and never reappears—lose all dignity of complexity. And when I am on the other side, reading a story or hearing about someone’s trip, I let the stereotypes stay.
I hate sacrificing people.
But I have to, and I do it. And it makes me feel like shit.
NPR called Josh “a modern-day Jack Kerouac” after he wrote about his 7,000-mile, no-money hitchhiking journey through the United States. After hitchhiking, he found homes in the Pacific Northwest, the Episcopal Church, and the post calvin. He now helps authors introduce their books to the world as the marketing manager for HarperCollins Leadership, builds websites as the owner of Branded Look LLC, and makes trail maps as the owner of Where We’ve Been Trail Maps. Josh’s writing has appeared in places such as The Emerson Review, Front Porch Review, and Perspectives.
