So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

  Let’s take an example, in this case a kind of personal writing we all do, writing about a trip. Your diary might list mundane facts:

  Stayed in a small hotel in the Marais. Paris is expensive. Ate in three restaurants then started buying take-out to bring it back to my room. Parisians basically tolerate you when you buy things but otherwise pretend you don’t exist.

  Your journal might choose certain facts more selectively:

  I was shy about bringing food back up to my room and carried a large back pack at all times, enabling me to preserve my pride when undergoing the scrutiny of the concierge who never lifted his eyes from his newspaper but surely followed the smell of double creme goat cheese all the way up the elevator shaft. I did my shopping on the Rue Rambuteau, a winding grubby market street where the chefs of many small restaurants split their lists—one shopped for vegetables, the others poultry or fruit—before meeting at morning’s end for coffee. I practiced my French outside every establishment, carefully constructing my sentences for the discriminating third assistant apprentice to the pastry chef who clucked at my stupidity while handing me change for a hundred franc note.

  In a memoir, however, we might squeeze the situation in order to reach that place where the personal touches upon universal experience:

  The large clock at the Gar du l’Est read five-forty; exactly ten minutes until departure.

  “S’il vous plaît, monsieur,” I said again, as I had after every fractured sentence cobbled from my phrase book. More slowly this time: “Deux billet en seconde pour Limoges, non fumant?”

  How hard could it be to book two tickets for a non-smoking car? But through the tarnished brass bars of the cage, the ticket seller appraised my worth. Foreign. Male. Middle class. No one who knew his name or his superior or whose complaint would mean a thing. Nothing I was or had ever been, no accomplishment in my life, no feigned kindness on my part, not even my evident need moved him. I watched the large hands of the station clock move. Five minutes to departure.

  Clumsily, I repeated myself.

  He sighed. “Je ne peu pas vous comprends, Monsieur.”

  What did he not understand? What was I saying incorrectly? We had reservations for a rental car in Limoges. A hotel was booked and paid. It was too late to find a room in Paris for the night and we hadn’t an extra franc to spend. We had to make this train.

  The woman in line behind me cursed. The man behind her shouted something I did not need to have translated.

  All our belongings, our suitcases, lay at our feet. The official looked through me, the smudge of sweat on my forehead, the reek of my nervous breath. “Suivant!” he signaled for the woman behind me.

  I blocked her path and pressed my face to the cage. “Can you understand English?” I tried one last time. “Can’t you please speak English with me.”

  I saw the first hint of smile. “Naturellement,” he said. Of course he could speak English. “Mais pas à Paris.” But not in Paris.

  In the smug set of his mouth I recognized the disdain I myself had shown the gypsies who surrounded me in the train station in Prague and the old ragged panhandler in Earl’s Court. I understood at that moment that the nasty Parisian bureaucrat had forever altered the way I would treat a stranger in need.

  In at least one way, autobiography is the opposite of biography. Autobiographers know everything; biographers never know enough. Biographers have to research a life for many years to figure out what to put in; you have to concentrate on what to leave out. You can’t possibly tell us everything about yourself, so you need a narrative strategy.

  The plot of a novel might involve a character with a longing, a need—say, to find someone who ran away with his lover, or an emotional need—to come to terms with her lack of education, to accept herself. The problem of satisfying this longing might be the arc of the action of the book, commonly called the plot. The need can’t be satisfied too easily, of course. The reader wants to observe the character over the course of time, wants to watch her interact with others and make decisions in difficult situations. So the writer creates obstacles that force the character into action.

  Braided Lives is a novel about a young woman from a working class family in Detroit who desperately wants to be a writer in spite of the fact that she has no financial or emotional support from her family and faces the dead end life of many poor young women in the Midwest of the 1950s. An autobiographical novel was Marge Piercy’s strategy for telling her story.

  If you are shy about the effect of your story on other people, fiction may afford you the distance you need in order to discuss your life. Obviously, if you label your piece fiction, the reader is never sure what is true and what is not. But just as important, you the writer are encouraged not to stick to the absolute facts as they happened, but to create variations on the theme that was your experience.

  The most apparent strategy is to change the names and the places. Once you do even this much, you find that strange characters tend to join the party. For example, if you shift your family drama from Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn to an ocean liner in the mid-Atlantic, you need a captain and a crew and other passengers to make the voyage real. Suddenly there are people around who had nothing to do with your family. Now each character may be true to the role they played in the family—that is, the bitter and demanding old-world family matriarch or the youngest son who steals—but the scenes in which they interact might be quite different. A storm at sea could replace the fire that gutted your third floor apartment. People are true to character no matter what the disaster; indeed, no matter what the time period or setting.

  Some writers go back in time to tell their stories, place their characters in historical situations, while remaining true to their own experience. Other writers choose science fiction. Their characters live on distant solar systems, three hundred years in the future. But what concerns those characters three centuries from now may very well be a father and son who cannot communicate, or a daughter troubled by her mother’s addiction, or a woman who is in love with her sister’s husband. It is naïve to imagine that people in the past were free of the complications we suffer through today, and overly optimistic to think that people in the future will face no interpersonal problems.

  Piri Thomas, the author of Seven Long Times, chose to write about his life through a series of short stories set in prison. Toni Morrison says that her literary heritage is her autobiography and that through her novels she is imagining the interior lives of her ancestors, slaves in the southern United States. She says, “These people are my access to me. They are my entrance into my own interior life.”

  No matter which of the narrative strategies you try out or decide to pursue, you still have the problem of looking over your life and deciding what to put in and what to leave out, which will amount to the bulk of your life. Consider that many writers such as Lillian Hellman and May Sarton have produced a number of books about their lives, each focusing on a particular theme, a particular era, a particular significant other or crisis. There are probably as many narrative strategies as there are writers, but a number of them emerge time after time. An obvious one is to start from childhood and work toward the present in chronological order. Some people’s childhoods make fascinating reading; they had famous and powerful relatives (Gore Vidal), or they lived through extraordinary times (J.G. Ballard in Empire of the Sun’s World War II Shanghai) or they themselves (Simone De Beauvoir) had precocious insights.

  Another strategy is to start with a particularly interesting time in the near present, as Mark Matousek did in his memoir Sex, Death, Enlightenment, and go back to childhood to dramatize the various forces that shaped his personality. Then he resumes going forward to the present. Sex, Death, Enlightenment is a spiritual journey, another narrative strategy. The arc of action in the book is the author’s search for meaning and spiritual connection.

  Kingsley Amis tells the story of his life through remembrances of people he has met; Lillian Hellman does the same. In both
cases the authors’ friends and enemies are the jumping off points of the piece, allowing the author to riff about the politics and the mores of the times they lived in, their ideas and opinions, places they’ve lived, meals they’ve abhorred or remembered, but the actual subject is the author because we’re in their viewpoint, seeing and experiencing every encounter through their unique sensibilities.

  Memoirs, as opposed to full-fledged autobiographies, often shed light on certain aspects of the writer’s life rather than reconstructing their days on earth from start to finish. Writing about subjects that have touched your life, such as people you have known, or cats, or your years in school, or music, or each of your lovers, or every car you ever owned or one particular house you lived in, can be the scaffolding upon which you can build your narrative strategy. Remember, you are writing about yourself and your thoughts and feelings and emotions as they relate to these touchstones. You can go back and forth in time and memory, dip into childhood or the present for a few paragraphs or pages as your story dictates.

  Now you may think you know everything there is know about your life, but it’s not always clear exactly what your story is, where you fit into it and what you are trying to tell the reader.

  The New York Times columnist and host of the PBS series Mystery!, Russell Baker, told great stories about his huge family and was encouraged by his editor to write something they both referred to vaguely as “the growing up book.” In a speech at the New York Public Library (reprinted in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser) Baker said that he put it off for years until he decided, in the 1960s, that he needed to communicate to his children some sense of the pride and dignity of their family. At about that time, his mother was stricken ill and he decided out of due respect to her to write about the times he and his mother went through together. Being a reporter, he packed his tape recorder and interviewed his vast array of relatives, transcribed the interviews and came up with a four-hundred-fifty-page manuscript about all the hard but wonderful times of family generations gone by. He sent the manuscript to his editor and waited for a response. And waited. And waited. All experienced writers know that an agent’s (or editor’s) enthusiasm is inversely proportional to the amount of time they take to read your manuscript and get back to you. Overnight: they love it big time. Weeks: you’re in for trouble. When no response came, he knew something was wrong. When he re-read the book, he realized that although this was to be a story about a boy and his mother, known as a remarkable but tough-minded lady, he had dutifully recorded all his relatives’ interviews but had left himself and his mother out of the book. It was nothing but journalism, an accurate but not very compelling sketch of the Great Depression.

  Baker decided he had to delve deeper. He had access to his mother’s keepsakes, specifically her trunk. Inside it he discovered several interesting things. One was a cache of love letters between his mother and a man she had never mentioned; the other was her marriage certificate, which proved that Russell Baker was a love child, conceived out of wedlock. This discovery cleared up a lot of things for him, mysteries about his mother that he never understood, such as the animosity between her and his father’s mother. Beforehand, this relationship had been incomprehensible. Now on the one hand, he feared that to mention these very personal discoveries in his book would be airing dirty linen and exploiting his mother’s past for commercial purposes. On the other, he felt if he wanted to honor his mother’s life, he had to be truthful. He had to show her as a person who acted as she did for good reason. So he decided to rewrite the book concentrating on just a piece of his life, a story line he referred to as the tension between a mother and son. His strategy in this book was to cast light on one corner of his life, albeit a significant one. He left out a great deal of material that failed to contribute to that story—which amounted to most of that original four-hundred-fifty-page manuscript.

  Any memoir or autobiography is a way of investigating the substance of your own life or a segment of it, a theme running through it. Others will sometimes come to your writing asking the same questions as you yourself must ask when you are writing : What are the full implications, the essence of my experiences ? Perhaps you are writing for the next generation. Perhaps you are writing lest you or others forget something important. Perhaps you are just trying to make sense of what you have done and what has been done to you. No matter what your intention, you can’t simply record what happened. You have to shape and examine it.

  You can think of the facts as containers—empty until you fill them with meaning and imagination. One day at a family gathering, a boy falls into the river. That’s a fact. But what does it mean until I tell you that his father, a jealous and secretive man, bitter about his own difficult childhood, famously afraid of water, terrified of embarrassing himself in public, dives in to save the boy? Or until I recount the shame the boy feels at causing his father to flail awkwardly in front of the relatives to stay afloat; and the boy’s guilt, at the same moment he is struggling for air, that he had made his father ruin his one good suit? What is a mere fact in light of the boy’s sudden realization that his demanding and inscrutable father deeply loves him? In retelling the facts, in exploring what the facts imply, they may resemble a new situation. The experience won’t be exactly like the one you lived through, but more intense. The incident may have been over in sixty seconds while it may take you years to figure out its implications, days or months to write it. As we have remarked earlier, sometimes when you write of your own experience, whether in personal narrative or in fiction, you lose the memory as it happened. The artistic reconstruction of the event replaces what actually occurred on that day or in that year, because it is shaped, more vivid, investigated for its implications. You create a small world of your own with meaning that reaches out to others. If you want people to make the effort to read about that world, you have a responsibility to your reader. You must make your characters real and convincing and multi-dimensional. Your descriptions should make your physical details vivid. Mere reportage and statistics, however faithful to the truth, do not make interesting reading.

  When you search out your narrative strategies, you might choose a subject, rather than your entire life, that you can infuse with your unique language and intelligence. M. F. K. Fisher used food. Willie Morris, his dog Skip.

  Don’t worry if you don’t think you have an interesting life. Senators and generals, trial lawyers and movie stars, for all the action in their lives, are constantly writing less than interesting books about them. V. S. Pritchett was right on the money when he said, “It’s all in the writing. You get no credit for living.”

  The Exercise: The Parallel Universe

  Think of an incident in your own life. It can be an argument, or an erotic experience, or your first music recital—some memorable incident. The best incidents for this exercise carry some emotional weight: happiness or misery, fear, nervousness, embarrassment. (If it’s been an incident you’ve been reluctant to tackle in your writing, so much the better.)

  You are going to write about that incident. You are the main character in that story. But ... you are going to disguise things in a big way.

  Here are some suggestions (choose one or more):

  Write in the third person.

  Pick a main character that is not you.

  Change the place the incident occurred.

  Change the time period (make it happen in the past or the future).

  Change the sex of the character.

  Naturally, you’ll have to make adjustments. If your incident concerns a crush you had on the captain of the ice hockey team and you decide to set your piece in Barcelona instead of Minnesota, the object of your affections will also have to change to accommodate the new surroundings (maybe captain of the soccer team? maybe a matador?).

  Your aim is to be true to your emotions and your version of the incident but to distance yourself from it, disguise it so that:1. The average reader of the piece would n
ot see you in it but feel what you felt and,

  2. Perhaps more important, you can write your story without worrying about whether someone will see you in it or whether you are betraying other people.

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  Choosing And Manipulating Viewpoint

  In discussing characterization, we looked at the chemistry involved in characters in fiction—our attraction to them, repulsion from them. Often we respond to them as we would real people or sometimes as we would “selves” we put on. We may even imitate a particular character with whom we identify. There are three basic strategies for dealing with that chemistry.

  In the first case, you want the reader to keep an emotional distance from the characters, as in Brecht’s Threepenny Novel, as in the work of Sol Yurick and in Doctorow’s Ragtime and Loon Lake. You intentionally and repeatedly distance the reader from the characters by the tone, by the placement of the vision, by a maintained coldness, by certain comic effects, by interposing a very strong voice between character and reader, or by adapting an omniscient point of view well above all the characters, in order to make them seem more like robots or ants and less like people we might know.

  The second strategy for viewpoint occurs when you want the reader to identify with one character strongly. (Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest series, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Tree.) They will go through your narrative looking out through the eyes of that particular person and only that person.

  In the third case, you give the reader a choice of characters with whom to identify, at least two and perhaps several to choose among. In Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, viewpoints alternate between the father, the mother, the younger sister and the older brother. Or in the three-generational novel, Living To Tell, by Antonia Nelson, the viewpoint moves from family member to family member.