Here's a travel short story I did recently, set in Bangalore, India when I was there a couple of years ago.  I'm in Morocco at the moment - I get about, hey! More of that next time.

Breakfast in India.
I looked up and down the dusty street - it was hotting up.  The cooler early morning mist had lifted and the sun was beginning to burn. I was wearing a thin loose cotton shirt, over knee-length, tan cotton trousers, because as the day wore on, I couldn’t bear anything but loose cotton next to my skin. My cotton army surplus hat shaded my face and dark sunglasses kept the glare away from my eyes. Crate laden horse drawn carts vied on the two way street with beat-up cars, vans, a few SUVs and bright yellow tuk-tuks, their tourist passengers hanging on grimly as they swerved through the traffic. I knew how it felt - like one more swerve and you’d tumble out from the wide open sides.  Horns honked and blasted, men shouted, crates rattled. India is rarely quiet and in the towns and cities it’s a mad cacophony of constant noise.

I went to cross the road and jumped back to avoid the large milky-brown cow,with long curved horns, that I hadn’t seen emerging from behind a van. Sacred cows wandered the streets and traffic untouched and whether you were a pedestrian or vehicle they’re another hazard to watch out for.

 I could see the street stall on the corner.  He sold fried eggs and chapatti.  He was fat, brown and smiley, wearing a grubby white vest that he wiped his hands on here and there. I could see him breaking an egg onto the hot, round griddle in front of him and pouring some floury white mix like a pancake, beside it. He spread the chapatti mix as thin as paper on the griddle and then expertly he flipped it over to brown the other side. Then the egg – breaking the yoke and swirling it with his spatula and flipping that over too.  A thin man wearing a blue and white dhoti and green shirt was waiting patiently.  I approached – I love Indian food, but the thought of another dhal curry and rice for breakfast – again …. I stepped over a big round splat of cow dung on the road side – you didn’t want to tread on one of those in sandals or you’d be watching the rich brown dung squirting in between your toes – and the aroma – phew!

I nodded to him and he nodded back – he knew what I wanted – I wanted that sizzling fried egg wrapped in a roti with the grease running down my bare arm as I bit into it –all for the equivalent of 25 pence. I could smell the hot chapati and egg being handed to the man in front of me, who was holding out a few rupees.  I smiled, as he broke MY egg and dumped a spoonful of the floury mix onto the hot plate which he was now spreading with his spatula. His face was impassive.  My turn I thought my eyes fixed on the griddle.

 

Emotional Rescue

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‘.. I'll come to your emotional rescue,' as the Stones' song goes.  Sometimes our writing needs some emotional rescue - we tell a story but fail to include the emotions, the full spectrum of emotions that can bring life to your writing.  There's the basic list: love/hate; sad/happy; anger/calm; bored/excited; tired/energetic; powerful/powerless and all the variations on these.

If you're writing a scene, you can show emotions when you describe an interaction - between the character and yourself or someone else. A direct confrontation is easy to show as its 'out there', visible,  you can watch it unfold.  But not all confrontations are out in the open.  Some are under the surface, quite hidden, some are slow-burning.  How are you going to highlight/reveal them?

Sometimes the unfolding story can build emotion gradually, layer upon layer without having to be revealed directly. Or sometimes a few broad brush strokes are enough to point up the tension between two characters.  If you're writing memoir, you'll have intimate knowledge of the different emotions going on at various points of the story. Just remember to bring your own feelings and emotions in to play - not just those you observe in others if you really want to bring your scenes to life. And the sme applies to writing fiction, but in that case you are using imagination.  

 When I started writing my first memoir (many years ago) I thought I’d write the story as an observer, keep myself in the background.  Feedback in writer's groups was often '.... but we can't see you, we don't know what you're feeling.'  You can't just be an observer - it doesn't work, the writing doesn't come to life. You have to put yourself in there. It means you have to be vulnerable, that’s what I was avoiding in the early days of my writing. The best memoirs take you to the time and place - seeing the sights and colours, smelling the smells and the reader must be able to identify with the protagonist in the story through revelation of the feelings.  You can't if you portray yourself as a cardboard cut-out.

Shut your eyes and immerse yourself in the scene you're describing - what are you feeling now and now and now?   I'm writing my second memoir and before I start writing I always think I can't remember - but I start writing and it's like a trigger - I can close my eyes and see what's happening unfold, I can picture the room or scene I'm starting to describe, smell the smells, breathe the hot dusty air and feel my fear at what I'm having to deal with. Then I'm away, I get excited and the words fall over themselves to come out, to describe what I'm seeing and feeling.  The trick is to bring all that on to the page, including your emotions. 

Lies, lies, damned lies - the subjective truth of memoir

Following on from the last article on the differences between memoir and fiction writing - what about the truth in memoir.  How true is your truth?

We all think we tell the truth, we know what is the truth and it's relatively easy to tell the difference between what is true and what is not. 

Here's a quote from a Buddhist leader of the Triratna Order - a worldwide group.  Sangharakshita is brilliant at analysing and drawing out the deepest meaning of certain concepts.  Here's his analysis of truth telling. In his book Vision and Transformation he starts by saying

'We all think we know exactly what is meant when it is said that all speech should be truthful.'
... and goes on to discuss this in relation to factual accuracy. He breaks down truth telling into a variety of components of which factual accuracy is one.

We've also all heard about how if there's an accident and several people are witnesses, they will all tell different versions of what happened. Sangharakshita again -
'We all tend to twist, distort or at least slightly bend facts, in the direction in which we would like them to go. ...'  He talks about adding to factual accuracy an 'attitude of honesty and sincerity.... saying what you really think.' 

Easy eh?  Until he asks whether most of us actually 'know what we think?' and asserts 'Most of us  live in a chronic state of mental confusion, bewilderment, chaos and disorder....How can we therefore speak the truth?'

Bringing this to the art of memoir writing, which I teach, I've often had people in my groups say that they're worried about whether they will remember enough, be able to write with any accuracy of events that happened often a long time ago.

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My first memoir - A Hippopotamus at the Table - Link to Amazon
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I've just written Chapter 8 of my second memoir.  I'm writing of events that happened 13 years ago (my first book was events from about 30+ years ago.) Before I started writing this chapter, I had a vague idea of the general scenario as it happened.  What came out, as I began to write, is two and a half thousand words about visiting someone in a police cell in Indonesia, descriptive passages, details, conversations. 

Out of the chaos and disorder in my head came a coherent story which is rather like Steven King and how he describes his writing process - as an archaeologist with a trowel, scraping away to uncover a story. He is talking about characters and events emerging in his fiction writing. But the mud and stones that I am clearing away are in my mind, in my memory.  This process enables me to put remembered events and all the thoughts and feelings that went with them at the time, into some kind of order, so that I can glue them together into a cogent story.  You just start writing about an event thinking you can't remember much and by magic the words tumble out onto the page and the story emerges, sometimes slowly, painfully, sometimes coming to a dead halt and sometimes your fingers fly across the keyboard.

Chapter 8 came to me slowly. After weeks of prevarication, I gave myself a good talking to and sat down and wrote the first two lines.  Once I'd done that it pretty much flowed out from there.  You could say (and I do) that prevarication is part of the writing process, that in the back of your mind you are sorting and ordering, sorting and ordering. By the time you psyche yourself up to write all those weeks of displacement have built up and here comes the archaeologist again, pulling out the precious object from the earth. The story seems to flow from my fingers onto the keyboard (it used to be my pen).

So to return to the title of this article - lies (ie fiction) and truth - what I've written is it one or the other.  Actually I think it is closer to truth.  What happened really happened, but from my own subjective viewpoint.  One of the other characters I'm writing about might remember it differently or they remember the same bones of the story, but with different angles and perspectives. That is their truth.  I can only write about mine.