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.

Not the same as fiction

The other day a fellow writer who writes fiction said ‘but memoir writing is virtually the same as fiction – when you write dialogue, you can’t remember the exact words spoken so you make it up.’ At the time I pointed out a couple of reasons why this statement is inaccurate, but I’d like to expand on what I said at the time with a loud voice!

     As a memoir writer, I have often been told, ‘Why don’t you just tell your story as fiction – many writers do?  You avoid lots of problems that way.’  And in my local bookshop, they told me – ‘no we don’t have a special memoir section, it doesn’t sell – well only celeb stories.’
     To answer the second point first – I like reading memoir and also crime fiction, at the moment.  Crime fiction I’ve come to quite late in life.  Maybe it’s a phase.  Memoirs I’ve always liked to read, I enjoy reading stories that are ‘true’.  Often they are breathtakingly extraordinary.
     And I’ve had an interesting life, many stories to tell, better than fiction in my opinion.  I feel it’s my duty to tell some of those stories – if only for historical reference for those born after many of the events. So I’m currently writing my second memoir.  The first A Hippopotamus at the Table was set in 70s South Africa.  The second is set in the London and Indonesia of the early noughties. I’ve also been teaching memoir writing over the last year or so to small but enthusiastic groups.  So I do (I think) have a grasp of my subject area/genre.  And those of us who write memoir have a particular calling to write truth (as we see it) and NOT fiction.  We’re driven if you like. And it's not easy, it takes courage as there's no where to hide.    
     Returning to the first point - is writing dialogue for memoir the same as writing dialogue for fiction?  A resounding NO from me on that one. Here’s a quote from someone, far more eminent than I am, who teaches memoir writing – the American Professor Judith Barrington in her book ‘Writing the Memoir’:

‘…who can remember the exact dialogue that took place at breakfast forty years ago?  And if you can make up dialogue, change the name and hair colour of a character to protect the privacy of the living, or even as some memoirists do – reorder events to make the story work better, how is that different from fiction?’

    Her answer to the question sums it up so well –

     ‘In memoir, the author stands behind her story saying to the world: this happened, this is true. What is important about this assertion is the effect on the reader – he [or she] reads it believing it to be remembered experience, which in turn requires the writer to be an unflinchingly reliable narrator.’

In fiction … if a writer presents it as fiction, the reader will usually perceive it as fiction. … in memoir (the reader’s perception is that there is a) 'central commitment not to fictionalise.’

Dialogue in fiction is created by the writer as between two fictional characters, they may speak in a way that imagined characters might speak, they may say things the imagined characters might need to say to move the story forward, they might even speak to the reader in first person,  but everything, both characters and dialogue is fiction, created in the mind of the writer.  That writer might even base this dialogue on other dialogues the writer has heard, but the content, the events, the character of the speakers are entirely invented.

Dialogue in memoir might seem to be made up, as the writer rarely has perfect recall of conversations from the past.  However, the memoir writer has (usually) a reasonable recall of the persons speaking, their characters, appearance, circumstances, age, social status, their attitudes and their relationship to the other person with whom they are in dialogue. 

For example, when, in my book, I wrote dialogue between myself and my then husband  in 1975, I couldn’t remember the exact wording, but I knew what we looked like, how we thought, what we knew and what our situation was in that place in time pretty exactly.  I knew the way he spoke and the way the two of us interacted, the humour, the teasing, the way we were towards each other.  Similarly with friends of different ages and acquaintances – I remember their characters, how they spoke, what their accent was and how they interacted with me and each other.

So when I write dialogue in any of my memoirs or autobiographical stories – No! No! No! It is NEVER the same as fiction.  I can stand behind what is being said and discussed and say ‘This is true.’