A Novel Can Be Written About Anyone

Can a novel be written about anyone?

Yes. With some caveats. 

In my writing and my reading – and indeed my going about life in general – I allow myself to be consumed by narrative. This is unavoidable when reading and just as necessary when writing, but I would guess that not everyone lives their life conceiving of themselves as playing out a narrative. For me, it is a way of understanding, a way of sorting out some sort of structure for the mess that is life. 

Because I subscribe to this practice of a narrative conception of life, it is easy for me to say that a novel can be written about anyone, because I assume that anyone’s life can just as easily be conceived of as a narrative. The question in this prompt, for me, is not just asking if a novel can be written about anyone, but more pointedly, can an interesting novel be written about people with uninteresting lives?

The line between simply writing a novel about someone’s life and writing a compelling novel about someone’s life lies of course in how it is told. This is why we’re devoting ten weeks to understanding narrative theory, is it not? We want to understand what makes a narrative tick, and, more importantly, what makes us want to keep reading it.

While Oppen Porter does indeed seem to have led an interesting life, the driving force of Panorama City is its form. We get the honesty and openness of Oppen’s first person narration, but we also get the added twist of his narration being directed at his unborn son. This becomes convenient as a storytelling tool, because naturally Oppen would want to tell his son stories worth hearing and stories that carry some sort of message or lesson, and thus we benefit from this calculated story crafting.

It is these kinds of techniques that can turn anyone’s story into a story that wants to be heard. The crafting lies in careful selection of stories, of time period, like the forty days Oppen spent in Panorama City. I think I’ve already referenced the whole “fiction is life with the boring parts taken out” adage, but essentially that’s what I’m getting at here.