Not My Biography, Exactly

In the last post, using anecdotes as starter dough, I encouraged you to use your own biography as a launching pad for a story. The end product doesn’t have to resemble the initiating thought and may take you to an entirely different place than the ‘real’ story.

But while I think it is a great idea, there’s one caveat. This can be a way, however inadvertent, to slide into retelling the story so that your David wins against Goliath, your weasel against the lion.

The temptation in writing your own biography

In giving yourself permission to take off from the original memory into something possibly quite different, there can be a lure to weave the new story in a way where you look better/smarter/more prescient than you did in real life. I stood up to the bully and didn’t slink away; my ridicule was actually a gentle joke. It’s easy to shape things so that the story turns out as you wished it had or what you want people to believe.

Trust me, it almost always turns out to be way more compelling writing if you stick with the truth. I know it sounds as if I’m talking out of both sides of mouth—take flights of fancy  and stick with the truth.

But the truth I am talking about is emotional truth. I don’t care if you change your school yard to another planet or make the stakes earth-shattering rather than hurt feelings. But I do care whether the underlying emotion is real. If you can capture the feelings when you let the bully to beat up another kid, so long as you were safe or the consequences of being less than what you aspire to, then the story can take off in any direction you like and still be true.

Memoir or fiction?

You would think that how close you need to stay to the truth would depend on whether you are writing fiction or a memoir. More truthful for a memoir, not so important for fiction.

Well, maybe, but it isn’t as easy as all that. For one thing, the two genres are often conflated. More than one author has used actual events in his fiction and we have all read memoires which we know have got to be more fiction than fact.

Sometimes this conflation seems purposeful. I didn’t want to be President anyhow; I was never wrong. But other times, the mixing of the genres may not be intentional. As I mentioned in my last post, I wrote a whole sub-plot which I thought was auto-biographical until my sister pointed out the event had happened to her rather than me.

But examples of this bleed between genres don’t have to be as blatant. You may use an anecdote whose interpretation is obvious, only to discover that another participant in the event remembers it completely differently. One of you is talking fiction but you’ll probably never figure out who.

Truthfully, I just can’t get worried about what genre you call your manuscript. As long as you keep close to that core of emotional truth wherever the story takes you, your writing will have the ring of reality to which readers respond.

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