Metablog on Metafiction

I am not writing this. This blog is writing me.

I did not want — nor was I able — to write this myself. I will create a persona as I go along to do the word for me, let’s call him Ronosaurus Rex, someone simpler, who does not get pimples nor have a crick in his neck (such things won’t be mentioned). Not only will I simplify, I will fictionalize myself and make myself seem smarter, wittier, and, while I am at it, better looking.

So, keep in mind that Ronosaurus Rex is only part of the story. What is the bigger story? Ronald Broderick Richardson is the name the government knows me by. I usually prefer the less pretentious sounding Ron Richardson, an instructor of composition at San Francisco State University, as well as a business English teacher and organizer of social activities in the Platinum Program of St. Giles International — San Francisco. This professional sounding person is only part of who I am, as any of my friends would tell you. I will not inform you about the parties I go to or the long walks I go on listening to big band swing music. I will not tell you that I hate to cut my fingernails or that I love Corn Chex.

Ronosaurus Rex is a simplification of Ron Richardson, who is a simplification of the person my friends know as Ron, who in turn is a simplification of the complex and contradictory idea I have of myself, which is a simplification of my whole self, whatever that is. But this is not a story about me anyway, at least not directly, it is a story about stories. To tell it, I must invent a speaker, which I will call, for convenience, myself. The needs of the blog will determine the voice I use. If you know it is a lie and I know it is a lie, then I will be telling the truth.

Every piece of writing, fiction or nonfiction, requires the invention of a speaker, who may (or may not) share certain characteristics in common with the writer, such as a name, a gender, and a context. Nevertheless, this speaker is not the writer. Make no mistake. Even the most honest speaker must necessarily simplify or preface every utterance with a story as long as their lives.

Even if this were possible, the autobiographical portion alone, which would supposedly defictionalize the speaker before any true statement could be made, would stack all the way to the top of Everest. But it would necessarily be told from a certain perspective, with a certain agenda. No two people ever tell the same version of any event, however simple (unless they have picked up certain phrases and ways of telling a story from each other, which often happens).

Even if we could produce a text from here to Jupiter, which recorded every detail of every event that happened in our lives with every person, place and thing from ten thousand perspectives, it would not be true, in the sense of “This is what happened,” because it would not be what happened. It would not be what happened, but a recreation of it in code, inert code, without life or meaning until it is picked up and then, dear reader, oh then . . .

A different story altogether is told as the reader reinterprets the letters on the page. Readers pick up the inert code and “play it” in their brains, in glorious Technicolor imagination! And nothing, I promise you, nothing will look like it did when it first happened.

It is fiction. All of it.

At least that is how the story goes.

Photos by Omar Rodriguez Rodriguez.

(To read about how other authors fictionalize themselves, read The Decameron With and Without a Frame Story, Chaucer: A Bad Poet and a Didactic Bore, and Who Wrote Don Quixote?).