Using Your Anecdotes as Starter Dough

We all have anecdotes. Memorable moments, good and bad, which swirl around in memory. Carol Shields suggests that, like Alice Munro, you use your experience as starter dough[1]. For the non-bakers among you, starter dough is a piece of dough kept from a previous batch which is used as leavening for new bread. By careful tending, starter dough can last for years or decades and continue to provide the umph for bread. Great analogy, no? Remembrances from your life can be the starter dough to create the new bread of a story. It is a jumping off point to add the ingredients you want.

Norman Mailer, author of both fiction and nonfiction, had a similar although somewhat different take. He came to the world’s attention with The Naked and The Dead, a novel set in World War II. I saw an interview with him, discussing its writing. I paraphrase, but he said that he had never been in a war but he knew what it was to fear for his life. He used that life understanding to inform the writing of the novel.

So great writers have used their lives to infuse their writing with reality.

Starter dough anecdotes—an example

Although this seems like good advice, I realize that it may be a bit difficult to imagine how that might happen. So, an example might be helpful.

My novel, Kimono Spring, is a semi (emphasis on semi)-autobiographical novel. In it, the seven year old protagonist, Julie, is picked to play a child in an amateur Japanese theater production where her father is the lead. Julie only has two lines but her father won’t translate their meaning. The reader figures out that Julie is playing an illegitimate daughter and her father is loath to tell her that. But because she doesn’t know what she’s saying, she confuses them during the performance and forces the other actors to improvise around her blunders.

As anecdotes go,  it’s all right, no? I used my memory of the event and embroidered it. I mentioned it to my sister who was three years older than me. She instantly took exception and said it was her not me who had been in the play. Well, honestly it did make more sense that they would use a ten year old rather than a seven year old. I guess I was so jealous of my sister getting the role that I implanted in my memory that I had been the star. Even to the point of remembering mixing up the lines.

So, in this case, it turned out to be borrowed starter dough. But it allowed me to take off into a whole sub-plot of the novel.

How do I do this in my writing?

In the example above, because I ‘remembered’ confusing the lines, I had to come up with a reason why she fluffed them. To add to the mix, I showed a seven year old preening in her role while the reader realizes that the father is slowly falling in love with a woman from Japan also in the play. This ‘memory’ allowed me to expand into story.

You can do the same with your recollections. Although I’d suggest using your own starter dough. Next post: Where starter dough and truth collide.

[1] Shields, Carol, Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing Random House, Canada, 2006, p.17