Finding the Red Square

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to hear Neil Gaiman give a talk at the University of California Santa Barbara. This was at the height of ‘The Sandman’ and he spoke for a while about comic books and his writing process. Then he took some questions. I was sitting in the front row and raised my hand. He called on me so, not very clever or calm to be the first one to go, I managed to ask him about ‘Violent Cases’ and his apparent use of autobiographic details.

I suspect it was a question he had answered before, either to a similar class or a reporter or quite possibly to himself. He spoke about writing as a process similar to creating a mosaic, using different colored squares to bring a story to life. The blue squares might be true things that happened to other people that he heard about, the yellow ones might be invented things, the green squares were stolen from history or myth, the red squares are be actual autobiographical details, and so on.

He concluded the metaphor by answering my question that, despite the presence of red squares in ‘Violent Cases’ and ‘Mister Punch’, both stories are inventions. I believe was he said was “Are they autobiographical? Absolutely and not at all.” Then he made a joke about how ‘Mister Punch’ could not be published until a certain great-aunt of his passed on, as there were more red squares than she would be comfortable with — or, at least, more than he was comfortable with her being comfortable with him being comfortable writing about.

(No, you’re not mistaken, that last sentence is awful. It sounds only slightly better when read aloud, like most of my work.)

It’s a natural tendency to assume that a writer is writing about themselves. Some writers do it more than others. I was surprised to learn how much of Wallace Stegner’s work is autobiographical. And I’ve wondered for years about John Gardner and how much of himself was a part of Mickelsson. Then there are writers like Paul Auster who seem to deliberately blur the line further, playing with our tendency to assume by accenting his stories with dark pinkish squares that seem so close…

There are even cases where critics, academics, and other busybodies come along after the fact and try to paint a few of the squares red, to justify their own assumptions and theories. Those people drive me crazy. As do the people who think that you shouldn’t be allowed to use red squares at all.

Over the past few days I’ve received a number of very nice and comforting e-mails and phone calls from people asking when my father died. Even he called to verify that he was, in fact, still alive. Or perhaps he just wanted to make sure that I knew he was.

All because of the line “He was a fox, and he was an old fox / when he died.”

(For the record, there are very few red squares scattered throughout what I’ve written and the handful that are there are outnumbered — usually by the green squares. Perhaps in a few years I’ll have to explain why you can’t find books by Robert Gaines at the library, that my apartment isn’t actually haunted, and that my children have never visited the Underworld.)

Maybe we look for red squares, we assume they’re in there because we want them to be. Maybe we don’t just want our stories, we want the people who write them. Maybe red squares are our points of contact with a person and a process that we want to know better.

Or, maybe, we just want to believe.