BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Novelist Tim O’Brien made a confession.
When it comes to writing his many celebrated books, the author said has no set process in mind. “I’m more of a trial and error guy,” O’Brien said, adding that stories usually find him. “My novels are always born in what might be just a scrap of language – a bit of word spoken in the real world.” According to O’Brien, his Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel The Things They Carried was inspired by the phrase “This is true.”
“Out of those three words The Things They Carried was born,” he said. “I thought of how much is not true that we think of as true, how illusive truth is, and does it matter if a thing is true? What is truth?”
O’Brien spoke at Illinois Wesleyan University as part of the Seventh Annual Ames/Milner Visiting Author Program. A joint venture between Illinois Wesleyan’s The Ames Library and the Milner Library of Illinois State University (ISU), O’Brien presided over a question and answer period in Illinois Wesleyan’s Hansen Student Center in the afternoon, and spoke at ISU in the evening.
The afternoon session was filled with anecdotes and stories from O’Brien. “Sorry, I tend to answer questions with stories.” O’Brien said with a laugh. “I trust stories. When I hear or give exact, theoretical answers, they don’t really convince me. It is almost a distraction. But a story flows through that type of generalization.” In answer to one question, the author recounted receiving a letter from a woman who had broken off her engagement to a man who falsely claimed to be the author Tim O’Brien. “Everyone knows what it is to lie to someone, to be lied to,” said O’Brien, adjusting one of the ballcaps he traditionally wears everywhere. “That letter inspired [the 2001 New Yorker short story] ‘Too Skinny.’”
O’Brien also shared the story of his first novel, written when he was 10 years old, which he calls a “straight-forward plagerization” of a story called Larry and the Little League. “I read it after a particularly dismal little league practice. It was a bad day, I was really down,” said O’Brien, who played shortstop in his hometown of Wortington, Minn. “Larry could do all the things I couldn’t do – hit, field, run and throw.” O’Brien asked the librarian for a pencil and a pad of a paper, and proceeded to write a story called Timmy and the Little League. “When I felt my hand on that pencil writing this story, I was seeing another Timmy. I was seeing a Timmy who could have been a great shortstop, should have been. I was learning through doing what fiction wall about. That there are occasions when we do not have to write about what happened, but what almost happened, what could have happened.”
O’Brien said this idea of being inspired by life runs through his fiction. Most of his books, like The Things They Carried, are based around events and people from his time serving in the Vietnam War, but are not exact recitations of what happened. “That is what fiction is for. In a way I am inventing my own Vietnam, my own childhood, my own loves, but they are based on a reality beneath it – a dead father, a lost girlfriend, or a Vietnam that is now 40 years in my past – that I hope opens a door to you the reader that makes you feel something of what I felt,” said O’Brien, who lost his own father two years ago. “In those last hours and days, I could have and should have taken him in my arms. And I could have and should have told him I loved him, but I didn’t. Why? I don’t know. But you see, in a story, miracles can happen. My dad can sit up from the dead, and in the story my father can say, ‘That’s okay, I know you love me.’”