On Writing Fiction and NonFiction

Oct 23rd, 2023

When I was in sixth grade I was going to Robert Louis Stevenson School, aka PS 183 on 66th Street between 1st and York in Manhattan. My teacher was Mrs. Davis, a glamorous tall woman with dark hair, red lipstick and high heels who was so nice and so creative. She gave us an assignment to make our own story books for children and then Channel 2 News came to our classroom and covered the story.

My book was about a boy who wanted to be anywhere but where he was. He wanted to escape into his imagination. It starts off where he looks out the window. It’s nighttime and it’s time to go to sleep. He looks out the window at the stars and wishes that he was out there instead. And then he finds himself on a magic carpet flying through the sky.

And at that time in the 1980s, the world was so harsh that the better alternative seemed to be to escape into another world like the character in my children’s book. The mysterious AIDS epidemic had everyone in New York in a state of real fear and sadness, like a dark cloud all around us. It seemed there was no hope, no matter what people were doing, no matter the protests on the streets, no matter the money being raised.

Then my mother got hit by a car and almost died on June 16th,1989. We had gotten a phone call from a neighbor who saw a woman get hit by a car outside their window and she looked like my mother. It was rainy and dark out so it wasn’t clear. My father and I ran down the street a couple of blocks away to the emergency room at New York Hospital. I waited in the nurse’s office while my father went to identify their Jane Doe. But while I was waiting I saw a large ziploc baggie that clearly had my mother’s bloody clothes in it, and I just screamed because I knew it was her.

I started reading my old journals, reading through decades of emotions, deciphering the many hidden gifts in my grievances, revisiting things I had forgotten. I had always been writing in a diary since I was a little girl. My Grandma Sheila gave me my first diary when I was eight years old. Those early writings were not very deep but I got to see my handwriting, the way my little mind was thinking, what I was observing and understanding of the life that was going on around me. When I went back to school at Hunter to take film and media courses I took script analysis and creative writing classes and started to really explore and become more confident. I had professors that were very encouraging of my style. I had always written in a sort of poetic format.

FICTION

It was 2003 when I started writing my Fiction Story book. It was the first time that I took my poetry and little vignettes and pieced them together to create a story. It attempted to put myself in the shoes of others, a way to understand some of my relationships up until that point in my life. The whole process of writing was liberating and freeing. There was nothing depressing about it, even recounting heartbreaking events, because it was all about creation. It was artful. It was turning it into something new. My fiction writing process hasn’t changed too much over the years. It is like with other things that I do, an exploration of experience. While attempting to put myself in the shoes of others, I try to see through their eyes, to understand their feelings, their actions, when there are no real answers. When I was writing it felt very much like writing out a dream.

Each person is a universe within themselves. And then our universes collide with other universes, and it’s all one big story. What C.G. Jung would call the collective unconscious.

NON-FICTION

Whether it was my grandfather’s documentary, or The Real Anthony Fauci documentary, or the co-writing of The Brainwashing of My Dad, or anything else, it is always a similar process. When writing a script it’s very much about tapping into the vulnerable personal sensitive places of the story so that I can connect with others on that level. This is another strand of connection between my own creative writing for fiction and my non-fiction writing for documentary or biography films.

In my grandfather’s film, Mandrake the Magician, it was a hybrid of fiction & non-fiction, so the trials and challenges that my grandfather endured were partially reimagined through my poetic musings. This mixing of documentary-and-fairytale worked well for this subject for obvious reasons. My grandfather was a performance artist, a theater magician, and there was a fictional story following him around the country - a comic strip superhero with the same name that emerged during the same time. There were delicate moments told by his first stage assistant and wife, Narda. She described my grandfather’s car accident which nearly took his life. And later, during the heights of their success with the magic show, they tried to start a family but she was unable to have children which eventually led to their separation.

In the case of Jen’s father in The Brainwashing of My Dad, it was very much about Jen herself. That was a big part of putting together the script with her and Mel. I thought about having her tell her personal story on camera with a warm, intimate, shadowy, almost subconscious or reflective feel so audiences could really feel her experiences and connect. So it wasn’t only about the history of the media, but it was also about punctuating the film with her personal relationship with her father and the changes it went through over the decades. The audience enters her world and can easily empathize. Then, when all of these other voices became part of the story - the hundreds of individuals from across the country that were writing Jen about nearly identical experiences with their own family members - the story became about their shared personal experiences. Our interweaving lives.

With The Real Anthony Fauci - since the movie isn’t really just about Dr. Fauci but moreso about the transformation of our country’s entire health system - the personal level in this film became very much about Bobby Kennedy Jr. due to his experience with the captured agencies of our country, as well as his family background in government, and his own environmental advocacy work. Africa played one significant role in the story as it has been subject to U.S. influence and medical intervention for decades, and it was also a place Bobby travelled to as a child with his family and into his adulthood. He fostered relationships with African leaders over the years and learned how foreign assistance sometimes exacerbated the problems of Africa rather than alleviate them. This first hand information was important for audiences to hear - specifically that we need to be sensitive to the country’s local leadership, to be willing to listen to and respect their authority. So of course I included former South African President Thabo Mbeki in the film. He was one of the only global leaders in the 1990s who held scientific and medical conventions, debates, and discussions about AIDS research with the objective of finding the most conclusive evidence for the cause and effect and cure for his people.

Throughout this script, similar to The Brainwashing of My Dad, we find that the lives of strangers with shared experiences begin to interweave. For example, Dr. Paul Marik, who helped find successful, safe, and effective treatments for Covid had started his career in South Africa and cared for AIDS patients at that time.

Whether it be artists, doctors, politicians, scientists, journalists, our individual worlds will collide.

WRITING AND HEALING.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in Manhattan during the height of the AIDS epidemic really colored the way that I saw the world as a child and into adulthood. I was reading a book written by a trauma victim who endured decades of abuse and was unable to escape because severe mind-manipulation had taken place. She was eventually rescued by a man who wore many hats in the CIA which included researching mind sciences. And so he knew well the tactics and techniques of mind manipulation over individuals, and over the masses. He also knew the tactics and techniques on how to undo it. How to heal from it.

He taught her how to heal herself. He gave her the tools and encouraged her to empower herself. He let her own brain access the answers through writing. The act of putting pen to paper, to write out almost stream-of-consciousness, with no filter, to exercise and access that part of the brain. Perhaps the greatest challenge in writing is to tap into that part of us that is beneath all of the layers of fear and armor that we have been taught to shield ourselves with, in order to navigate the world.

Here is my Time Capsule “On Writing Fiction and NonFiction” -