THE RING OF TRUTH
by Christine Trzyna C 2010 All Rights including Internet and International Rights Reserved.
When I was in a writing class at a community college years ago, I ran into the problem of people critiquing my short fiction using the word "YOU" instead of "YOUR NARRATOR" or "THE FIRST PERSON." Now, I used the first person as my tense in most of my stories because I consider that the most personal and immediate voice, with other tenses too distant and maybe abstract, and so I can understand that what my stories had was "THE RING OF TRUTH."
Our professor emphasized that THE RING OF TRUTH was a very good thing. My readers cried at my stories or laughed at them. This was pre-computer and I was not a great typist. Sometimes I was irked because someone who read my story was irked by a typo that could be caught and fixed in no time with today's SPELL CHECK. (I never use the other editing functions on computers since I intentionally write breaking some of the rules as is but thank-you SPELL CHECK!)
Although my short fiction had THE RING OF TRUTH but was not the truth (I would call it non-fiction) some of my fellow writers continued to treat me as if I COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAVE HAD THE IMAGINATION I DID (or DO). For instance, I wrote a story about a young woman coming to terms with not having a father, a coming of age story in which the tension was between the young woman and her mother. From that point on, though I told him I had been born into a stable marriage and had both parents in the household, one of our group members always talked to me personally as if this was an issue for me. I guess when one has IMAGINATION it may include EMPATHY.
Maybe part of the problem with having the prized RING OF TRUTH in my work was that few believed my truths because they themselves were turning their realities into "fiction." Still, even if you know this is true of a class, round table, or workshop member, I think it's best to use THE FORMAL LANGUAGE OF CRITIQUE. You have no right to further the belief among strangers that what you know to be true of a friend is true!
