Why I Write Fiction

When I was five years old, I was in love with two boys in my kindergarten class, and I had a whole diary devoted to them. I kept the key hidden in the pages, so every time I wanted to write, I had to pull the covers apart as far as the lock would allow, and shake the diary until the key fell out.

The strange thing about my diary entries was that they focused not on my crushes on Roy and Jared, but on their infatuation with me. I lamented about how annoying their attention was. I had one diary entry titled, “Why Me?” that pleaded (with the diary?) to explain to me why Roy and Jared had singled me out as the object of their affection. Why not Kayla or Mandy or Lynne, or any of the other female kindergartners?

In another entry, I said that when Jared had seen me in my new dress, his eyes had turned to hearts and popped out of his head on long springs. (I remember the dress; it was fluorescent green, studded with rhinestones, and made of sweatshirt material.)

In short, my diary was, cover to cover, an enormous, whopping lie. I finally laid the whole endeavor to rest when the family dog, who was then just a puppy, chewed off a corner of my diary and ate it.

Years later, when I spent a semester in Israel during college, I decided to give journaling another go. This was a time in my life worth documenting, I figured. So I kept a diary in a notebook.

A few years later, I found that notebook. I opened it up and started to read.

“That never happened,” I kept saying out loud. “That’s totally not how that happened.”

And that was the end of my attempts at “reporting the facts.” That was when I started my novel.

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Diana Spechler’s fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, Moment, Lilith, and elsewhere. She received her MFA degree from the University of Montana and was a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. She lives in New York City, where she is at work on her second novel.

DianaSpechler.com