4 AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Introduction
Paul Magrs
Everything tends to become material. When you are writing you want to use up everything around you, everything that happens to you, everything from your past.
For me, it’s people that I want to get down on the page, somehow. They might be people I knew years ago and don’t any more – they’ve died or moved away. I want them remembered in some way. As large as life again.
Sometimes I have dreams and people from the past come back in incredibly specific and lifelike ways. The way they speak and behave is precise in a way that my conscious mind has forgotten. I find it reassuring to believe that some part of me remembers the tiny, seemingly irrelevant things. In those dreams I see how aunts and grandmothers, uncles and neighbours and school friends all behaved: my stepfather’s sister Jenny in stretchy nylon trousers, sitting on her kitchen doorstep and telling me about her crush on Starsky and Hutch.
I want my writing to conjure these people up in the way my dreams sometimes can. I want to introduce some of these people to others they never got a chance to meet and see how they would get on. In my dreams and fiction I want to look at the great ‘What if?’s. I want, sometimes, to change how things really did happen.
Sometimes I have very lucid dreams about the first house I lived in, in Darlington, where I stole yellow roses from the front garden next door; where I stood in the doorway behind my mam as she talked with the postman and I imitated his chronic twitch the whole time.
Some of these things have become anecdotes; the specific memory has been replaced by an actual narrative that my family and I tell each other. (Like when I was kidnapped at the age of three by a gang of rowdy teenagers and locked in a garden shed. My father found and rescued me and when he told me not to go with strangers I told him to fuck off: I’d been having fun.)
The actual memory gets occluded by the telling of it. If I want to write any part of these things as stories, I have to get past the anecdote and recover the exact feeling of that time; and also run the risk of replacing my memory with what I actually write about it.
When I was five we moved to Newton Aycliffe to live in a box-shaped house on a black-brick estate. Ours was one of the first houses finished, in fields of toffee-coloured mud. I did most of my growing up in that new town in the seventies and eighties (where the ice-cream vans ran round the maze-like streets bonging out ‘Lara’s Theme’ from Doctor Zhivago). I knew the people round the doors (precocious, chatty kid that I was), I was going to the school over the Burn, and I was using the shopping precinct in town.
When I first came to write seriously I wanted to get all of that place and time written down and captured. I didn’t know of any novels that were about the seventies and eighties in a new town. I didn’t know of any fiction about people like our neighbours and the people you saw down town.
I couldn’t start writing about it, any of it, though, until I’d moved away. Then it became a memory and was recoverable, somehow. I could see it more distinctly when I was across the country at university. Newton Aycliffe and the people I knew, my family and my past were all something I could make real by turning it into fiction. Realer, almost, than it was in the first place.
When it’s happening to you, life is terribly fast.
The one big party we had at our house was for New Year’s Eve in 1980. It was the one time a whole collection of people were brought together for the first and last time; the Tyneside branch of the family, the Dutch and the Australian contingent. I was ten and the night went by in a kind of glamorous haze. I remember my Big Nanna walking up the street with our neighbour Molly after midnight, both of them tipsy on Snowballs, both wearing flowing Dutch-print skirts (presents from Rini). They were off to look at Molly’s religious paintings, which she’d been laboriously executing on rolls of wallpaper.
I wanted that night to replay and replay for ever. As it turned out, the eighties weren’t that good a decade for most of the people there. Last year I eventually managed to write a short story about that night and those people and most of the satisfaction was in re-creating the characters: putting them back together in a way that could never now happen in the real world. It is as if they are stuck at that party for ever. And I can go back there whenever I want to. And other people can go now as well.
Here’s something to try. Write down the names of three people you have vivid memories of. Three people whom you knew but who never met each other in real life. Put them into a scene, maybe an impossible scene, in which they meet for the first time. You knew them all well and you can imagine how they would have reacted to each other, what they would have said to each other.
In daydreams we often wonder how so-and-so would have got on with so-and-so. Give yourself some time now to make that real. Engineer a possible brief encounter for these friends or relatives you remember.
You begin this kind of effort at salvaging the past by reminding yourself. What you learn, as you go on, is this: the means by which you remind yourself of the past are the very ones that any writer needs to use in order to create any kind of experience for their reader.
You need the exact colours and smells and textures.
These sensual clues are what can take you back at any moment to a point in the past. The tiniest of things can re-evoke the biggest, most elaborate scene. The classiest example of this is, of course, Marcel Proust dipping biscuits in his tea and having the whole lot flood back to him. But I’m thinking, more selfishly, of toast and marmalade and whisky in tea with a gang of new friends, wintry afternoons during my first year at college. Or I’m thinking about warm sausage rolls from the bakery after doing the shopping down the precinct with my mam; flakes of pastry down my jumper and the pop-eyed woman behind the counter who thought I was a girl.
Maybe the most effective way of recovering the past is through food. Tastes and textures can pull us back any time we’re not expecting it; the smells of other people’s dinner, a glimpse of wallpaper.
Childhood is a good place to start with recovering these exact sense impressions.
As an exercise, think back to being a child and write down the most evocative smell, sound, sight, taste and touch that you can remember. Then think yourself further on in time. What were the most vivid impressions when you were twenty-two? Thirty-seven? Forty-four? Is it easier to remember the very earliest senses or the later ones? You really have to work hard at recovering these experiences. But they do come back. And they are the key to recreating those times in a text of any kind.
Another thing that can’t help but draw me back is the way people talked. I wouldn’t say my memory is that marvellous at all. I have to keep notes everywhere to remind me of the simplest things. I do, though, have a curious memory for what and how people have said things. If I stop and think now, I can hear my parents telling me things when I was a kid, in their exact voices, in all their specificity; all their quirks and vocal mannerisms intact.
I can hear my Big Nanna wondering whether she’ll have a last cup of tea before bedtime; her Norfolk accent hardly changed after thirty years in the north-east. ‘I’ll not have another cup, due I’ll be wetting all night.’ My other Nanna telling my mam she wasn’t afraid of the ageing process in her broad Geordie accent: ‘I’ll fight the bugger tooth and nail.’ My granda, seeing him again after years, after I’d published my first novel. He had it on the shelf the day I went back, just after my Nanna Magrs died. He said, ‘Eeh, lad. You’re a clever bugger, aren’t you?’
Smells, tastes, snatches of dialogue and colours. When I think of the house in Darlington, the carpets are a swirling aqua and the curtains bright tangerine; there was a stark white unused room upstairs. Moving to the new house; helping to smear shocking-pink Windowlene on the windows. We painted the kitchen the same deep jade as my stepdad’s Ford Cortina. The spring of 1982 was yellow; the winter of 1989 silver and black (the stars like diamanté through the skylight in my student room). So I use the colours, too, to anchor me back.
These are all the things that make a piece of fiction real and vivid to me; the precise rendering of each of these elements. When I think of my favourite writers – Anne Tyler, Shena Mackay, Katherine Mansfield – they work exactly in this way upon me. They build an indelible atmosphere through a compressed, succinct accretion of observed, transformed detail. They make their stories seem like memories of my own: they become that immediate and pressing to me.
If you are drawing upon memory and autobiography for your writing then you have to remember this and work from the ground up; conjuring the atmosphere as fully and vividly as possible. You will always know more about these characters and circumstances than your reader will. You knew the people in real life; you know where they came from, what they did next; maybe what eventually became of them. Don’t be tempted to rush in and splurge and tell all straight away in an explosion of unmediated confession.
Let your reader get to know these people and places you are salvaging and re-creating from the past. Build them up carefully in all their specificities. You might change things and transform them to make it into a better story. You are free to do this. Once they’re on the page, they’re not real people any more. It’s impossible really to create people on the page; it’s a confidence trick. You are putting together an impression of them through gesture and colour.
You have to give an impression of them as three-dimensional people; ones that you and your reader can walk all the way around and could imagine meeting. It’s difficult because you have to be honest about yourself and the time and the people you knew then. You have to start seeing the things you didn’t see at the time.
It’s not always best to use the first person and begin ‘I remember’. Best, instead, to recapture some tiny part of a scene you recall and keep yourself out of it for a while.
Learn to fall in love with these people all over again. Remind yourself why you loved them in the first place, whatever happened later. Don’t let hindsight colour the picture you are putting together. You’ve got to return, Tardislike, to that exact point in time – and learn how to stay in that moment longer.
The characters in that moment are not flesh and blood, but neither are they ghosts. Now you’ve got characters and you have to make them your own. You’ve got responsibilities and you’ve got an amazing amount of freedom in writing about them.
Let them start talking to each other, again.
Memory: The True Key to Real Imagining
Lesley Glaister
I am on a beach. I don’t know where – Southwold perhaps. I am very small and wearing a blue ruched swimming costume, which scratches the tops of my legs and fills with bubbles of water when I go in the sea. But I’m not in the sea. I’m sitting on a big striped towel, shivering. My dad is sitting beside me and I’m thinking how hairy his legs are, like gorilla’s legs. Then I notice something: a hollow in the soft bulge of his calf, big enough to cup an egg in, not hairy like the rest but dull pinkish, fuzzy like newborn mouse skin. I want to put my finger inside and feel but I don’t. Somehow I know I can’t do that and I must not mention it. Then Dad gets up and hobbles down the shingle towards the sea. He breaks into a run when he gets to the flat bit before the sea begins. He plunges in and swims out and out and out. My mum is reading and my sister shovelling pebbles into a bucket. No one but me has noticed how his head gets smaller and smaller the further out he swims, until at last I can’t see him between the waves. He has gone. But I don’t shout or scream. I turn over and lie on my tummy on the towel, feeling my heart thudding against the lumpy pebbles. I have seen my daddy drown but I don’t say a word. I lie there with the sea or my heart roaring in my ears.
I lie paralysed by fear and guilt for what seems hours until I hear the crunch of footsteps and feel the sprinkle of cold drops on my skin. Daddy is back and is standing above me waiting for me to get off the towel. He is fine, invigorated and oblivious to my terror, rubbing himself dry, slurping tea from the thermos.
That experience encapsulates for me a key moment of growing up: the sudden realization of my dad’s vulnerability and his mortality – and by extension that of everyone including myself. An apparently insignificant moment when the bottom fell out of my safe child’s world.
It wasn’t until my father died, about twenty years later, that the seaside moment came back to me. Only then did it occur to me that the hollow in his leg was the scar of a tropical ulcer contracted during the war. He was one of the soldiers captured by the Japanese when Singapore was taken in 1941. He worked as a slave on the construction of the Burma/Siam railway, suffering cerebral malaria, cholera, dysentery, beatings, near starvation – an unimaginably traumatic time about which he never spoke. It was a deep area of silence. Not only was it never spoken of but there seemed an embargo even on wondering. It wasn’t until years after his death that it even occurred to me why, as a naturally curious child, I never even wondered. About ten years after his death I became fascinated by the idea of that deeply layered silence – not unique to my family, I know – and began to plan the novel which became Easy Peasy. The seaside memory – only a tiny moment in the book – was the seminal one from which that novel grew, the true key to real imagining.
There are very few literally true moments like this in my own fiction, although naturally writers vary enormously in the way they process and utilize memory. Much of what I write feels as if it is made up – but that really means that it is memory refracted through imagination, often unconsciously, into something new. This might mean a scrap of a childhood memory is blended with something I heard yesterday and comes out as something unrecognizable as either. That, I think, is the real stuff of fiction – memory blended, refracted, transformed. That is why something that is apparently entirely imagined can have the real force of emotional truth.
For instance, my mild dislike of confined spaces was transformed into a potholing disaster in Limestone and Clay. And the queasy embarrassment I felt as a child at an accidental glimpse of my father’s genitals (again on the beach!) dramatized into Jennifer’s mortification at the spectacle of her naked grandparents in Digging to Australia. This latter was quite unconscious, indeed I didn’t realize where it had stemmed from until years later.
And this unconscious salvaging is another and more fundamental way in which memory is employed in the making of fiction. Every impression ever made on a person from newborn babyhood onwards will contribute to the shape and texture of the imagination. And an individual’s personality is largely shaped by early experience: unconditional love, disappointed hunger, rejection, displacement by a newborn sibling, star or scapegoat status within the family. These all affect the deep patterning of expectation, the rhythm of a unique world view. This affects the deep structure, the rhythm that becomes apparent within a piece of writing. This is why with many writers similar tropes recur, similar themes are visited and revisited. Whatever the actual consciously chosen subject – from true romance to sci-fi fantasy – that pattern or rhythm is very likely to recur.
The most exciting moment in the writing of a novel comes with the onset of the wonderful trance-like state when a book seems to begin to grow itself, seems there to be discovered rather than created. Some writers describe this as the moment when the characters take over. It seems that the writer has little choice but to let them have their way. It is thrilling and feels somehow real. That is because it is. It is simply the deep unconscious patterning rising up and taking over the conscious critical planning mind. The unconscious rhythm that dictates the shape of most deeply felt fiction that has its germ in the structure of the writer’s personality; and which also bestows on each writer a unique and precious voice.
Would-be writers often object that they have no memories to draw on, or that nothing interesting ever happened to them. This is not possible. Memory can be hard to access, but it’s a skill that can be learned. And it’s not so much interesting things but unique ways of seeing ordinary things that makes the most original and satisfying fiction. Catching one little tail end of a memory and patiently teasing it out can be a way to start. And it doesn’t matter if the memory is not complete, nor entirely true. Remember you are writing fiction. A little kick-start from the memory can set off your imagination – and who knows where that might lead . . .
Try this: close your eyes and remember a pair of shoes or boots that you wore as a child. Maybe some pink satin ballet shoes with scuffed toes; maybe the Wellington boots inside which your socks always went to sleep; or the pinching toes of your best party shoes. It doesn’t matter, just take some time to picture them, then jot down everything you remember about the look, the feel, the smell of them. Now remember an occasion on which you wore them. Where were you going? What did you feel like? Maybe you were dawdling along behind your mum cracking icy puddles with your heel; maybe you were scared or bored or excited; maybe you were running a race in your brand-new rubbery-smelling plimsolls. Write the memory and if the memory runs out, start making up. That is fiction.
Writing from Experience
Nell Dunn
It is said that all fiction is an autobiography. What we write about has to be felt and therefore experienced, but it can be experienced in the imagination and needn’t necessarily be lived experience, or so I believe. What we choose to write about usually has an energy that agitates us. There is a sense of adventure as we sit down to write. What remains somewhat of a mystery is how real experience hits and provokes the imagination into a work of fiction.
I was evacuated during the war without my mother. I was three. In Steaming, written in 1981, I created a mother–daughter relationship, Mrs Meadows and Dawn. Mrs Meadows rules the roost. Dawn, the apple of her eye, now thirty-five, behaves like a three-year-old. She can’t even open the cat’s tin. She can’t bring in the milk from the doorstep when her mother is ill. They sleep in the same bed. We know something dreadful happened to Dawn but we never quite discover what it was. In real life I missed my mother. Dawn’s mother is not allowed out of her sight. By the end of the play Dawn has the upper hand and is defying her mother outrageously. In Steaming I got my own back and something inside me was satisfied.
In Babe, another play written a few years later, Babe, the daughter, is attempting to break free of her mother. She goes to Spain and finds a rich older man to take care of her, but this time it is her mother, Cecile, who can’t live without her and comes to find her to make her come home. At the end of the play Babe realizes, in order to be free, to have her life, she has to take care of herself.
Finally in My Silver Shoes, written in 1996, the mother, Gladys, is old and her daughter, Joy, devotes herself, with quite a few hiccups, to caring for her. Shortly before I wrote this book my own mother became ill and needed taking care of till she died. I visited every weekend and sometimes took care of her, and finally she died in my arms. A great gift from a mother to a daughter. But I needed to write about a daughter who had really ‘got there’ with her mother. Joy and Gladys knew everything about each other and the deep love was, in My Silver Shoes, lived out.
Sometime after finishing this book I dreamt my mother took me in her arms and hugged me and kissed me and told me she loved me.
Start with fifteen minutes’ notebook writing: odd scraps of dialogue overheard, descriptions of people and places, a dream from the night before.
- Shut your eyes and put yourself back in a childhood bedroom. Spend some time there remembering the wallpaper, the furniture, the smells, the noises. When you are ready, write about it in as minutely detailed a way as you are able. Don’t put any people in it. Try to use your memory and be absolutely accurate.
- Now remember yourself at this time. Put yourself to bed in that room. Who were you? Write about yourself from the pen of the six-year-old or ten-year-old boy or girl. Tell what you liked and disliked about your bedroom.
- Now your mother comes in to say goodnight. What happens? Write some dialogue between you and your mother. What does she look like when she comes through the door?
- Now your father comes in to wake you up in the morning. What does he say? What does it feel like? What does he look like?
Working in Pairs
- Take it in turns to tell your partner something drastic that has happened to you in the last year with as much detail as possible. Take five to ten minutes in the telling. Your partner need only listen attentively. No questions. Then write one another’s stories, changing the names and locations. First or third person can be used. Write taking two steps back as if you were writing a short story. Give a time limit of thirty or forty minutes for the writing.
Read out the story to your partner and check that any identifying evidence has been cleared. Ask permission for what you have written to become yours. Then the stories can be read to the wider group.
After the reading leave time for the stories to be discussed and polished. This exercise encourages the thought that everywhere there are hidden stories. It also encourages trust and intimacy between students.
- Again in pairs. Take it in turns to tell of an ongoing problem in your life around a relationship. Take five or ten minutes in the telling. Again your partner need only listen. No questions. Then, once again, swap situations and write for thirty minutes an imagined dialogue between the protagonists in your partner’s story. Feel free to create a setting for your dialogue. A cafe, perhaps, or a garden or a room in a house. Anywhere you care to make them meet. Trust your instinct to guess or imagine or even overhear what they might say to each other. You may break the dialogue to describe the setting but stick mainly to dialogue.
Experiment with saying things that maybe haven’t been said. This is an exercise in developing the writer’s natural intuition and learning to trust it. It is also great fun writing dialogue. Leave time for the reading out and discussion of writing dialogue.
- Spend a few minutes thinking about your own family. Include grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. Now consider who was the ‘outsider’ in the family. The one who didn’t really get included. Who was nobody’s favourite. Who somehow got left out and forgotten. Who often had bad luck. Describe as accurately as you can what he or she looked like. Focus in on a precise moment when you remember seeing them at a bus stop, in the kitchen, coming out of the bathroom. Write down exactly what you see with as much detail as possible.
In the second part of this exercise create a dialogue with your ‘outsider’. What would you like to tell them? Listen carefully to what they might like to say to you and write it down. You can also place this dialogue somewhere you know or somewhere imagined.
Read what you have written to your partner, then write down how reading your ‘outsider’ piece to another person makes you feel. How did hearing your partner’s piece make you feel?
Finally write a dialogue between yourself and your partner’s ‘outsider’, telling him or her how you feel about them in relation to your own life and problems.
The Shared Past
Anna Garry
Our memories are our ways of making sense of the past. Memory can be individual and personal, a sharp flash of recollection, an intense moment where feelings are concentrated into short, everyday events. A smell in the street can take you to your childhood or anywhere in your past, bringing back words, sounds, images. Or the smell might only haunt you, refusing to be identified, but filling you with longing for elucidation, or with strong feelings of recognition. The purpose of the writing exercise that follows is to give you ways to link into this powerful process, to write about memories, and then to learn about yourselves as writers, from what you and others have produced.
One of the most powerful impacts of guided writing from memory is the element of surprise, pleasure and energy that can arise from doing this exercise. It is important to come at it spontaneously, with minimum self-judgement, and not to worry about the coherence of the writing. In what follows I first outline what you need to do to produce the writing, and then I explain what can be learned from this exercise. If you are going to do the writing exercises yourself, I recommend that you write first and then look at the analysis afterwards. One of my students, in his seventies, said at the end of a writing session, If I’d known what your purpose was, in getting me to write about memory, I would have tried to meet it. This way I found out about my writing for myself.
It is important that you or your group spend little time thinking, and instead get down to writing, swiftly and without stopping. What may come to you are ideas, images, words, a narrative, even poetry. The main thing is to write whatever comes naturally. I assure my students that they may find some of the suggestions trigger more writing than others.
If you are concerned that you, or your class, may not get going easily, it is possible to preface this exercise with a warm-up session. For example, I might give my students a line of prose and then ask them to write for two to three minutes on anything that might follow from this line. I do find that the exercise works without this, and if time is limited, I do not bother. What is important is to get the students to write for about twenty minutes, without stopping, and then to give them sufficient time to read out their work to each other in groups. The session ideally ends with some guided class discussion about what this writing has produced.
I first experienced a form of this writing exercise on a weekend course run by the poet and novelist Mary Dorcey. I have developed it to suit my needs in both my evening and undergraduate creative writing courses. The aim is to get students to write for about five minutes on each of three potentially memorable moments in their lives. One of the advantages of the suggestions that follow is that they produce writing of validity and energy but, on the whole, they do not tap into memories that are hugely painful or could dissolve someone emotionally. If this is a first, or early, meeting of a group, this is important, because people may be feeling excited, anxious and vulnerable.
If you are guiding a group, you should do the timing. Ask the participants to write for about five minutes on each of the three subjects below. Reveal the topics in turn, without telling what the next piece is about. If you are doing it alone, sit with a clock and respond to each topic in sequence. It is possible for you, as group leader, to participate in this exercise, i.e. writing with the group. I imagine this decision will depend on your familiarity with the group or whether you are part of an informal writers’ group, where this could also work well. If it is a larger group, it is advisable to leave your own writing and concentrate on how the participants are doing.
The Topics
- The first day at school/kindergarten you remember
- The first journey you remember
- The first room you remember
I say to my students that it is not important to search for precise memories, rather to write down the first things you remember. One of my evening-class students couldn’t remember her first days at school, because she had started during the Second World War. What she remembered, and wrote about, were the effects of the war around her, the bombing, the air-raid sirens. And indeed, when it came to her writing about the first journey she remembered, it was the one where she was evacuated, by steam train. My students in their late teens and early twenties have vivid memories of that transition from home to school, of the colours, the smells and the emotions.
Looking at the Writing
Once the writing is completed the students stop. Some have produced over a thousand words, and even the ease with which this amount is produced can be a surprise to new writers. At this point I break the class into small groups and remind them that everyone is in the same position. They have all produced spontaneous writing. What I want them to do now is read out the writing to each other.
Use of the Senses
At this point I introduce an extra purpose to the discussion, one that is beyond discussing memories and sharing the communality and differences in their experiences. I want students also to focus on the use of the senses that has appeared, naturally, without thought, in the writing they have produced. Here, I say, they will find out which senses they use, spontaneously, in their writing. I write on the board the five senses: sound, sight, touch, smell and taste. I also introduce the important point that good fiction is based on the effective use of the senses, and that the senses, or concrete detail, in a piece of writing gives a reader a fundamental link to a writer’s work, allowing the reader to feel and experience the fictional situation (this is discussed further at the end of this piece). The groups then work on their own, reading their writing and identifying where the emphasis on the use of the senses is.
I circulate round the groups, listening to what people have discovered about themselves as writers. Some have remembered sounds and smells, like the foods they had to eat, which is the most common. The majority have written down visual memories: a room with an orange settee, a calf-skin rug, a lamp with a woman holding a torch, a holy picture whose eyes followed you wherever you moved to in a room. The intricacy and specificity of the memories are really impressive.
What also comes through strongly in the writing is a written expression of emotional experience, which underlies memories. Sometimes these emotions are so powerful that students don’t want, at first, to look at the use of the senses, but rather to examine how they felt at these times: fear of the first day at school, excitement about new clothes, tears at leaving your mother, anger at a journey that was forced upon you as a child, sadness about a room where there was no space and which had to be shared, and even terror at what might be under the bed or in a chest of drawers. Many students then suggested that emotional expression should be added to the list of the senses, as a way of looking at the writing. It is the expression of these moments of intensity in vivid detail that has this impact.
The exercise usually ends with a group or class discussion of the experience of writing. As this is an exercise that I do in my first class, the way I organize this discussion depends upon the group. It is very important that students should feel confident and comfortable about participating, and not feel forced to read out work before they are ready. With my undergraduates, this is usually not a problem, and we usually hear an extract from each student’s writing, though no one is obliged to read out. The writing is always strong, and it gives me the opportunity to point out the quality and richness of writing that can be produced by such a short exercise, with its focus on real experience. There are often common experiences, toys that the group remember, fashions or clothes that students may have shared, but until then have forgotten. There are often interesting choices in the perspective of writing voice. Sometimes students write as though the memory is in the present moment, others let it drift into a narrative, which explains, at a distance, what it felt like to be, for example, four or five.
In my evening class I am working with adults of all ages and backgrounds. They may have, for the first time, chosen to take what they see as an enormous step, they are allowing writing to be part of their life. I do not ask anyone to read out to the group at this point. For some people it is enough that they have got through the first meeting and have managed to write something. There is, however, always a lively discussion about what it felt like to write these pieces, about the particular senses that were focused on and why, and the surprise people felt at the differences and similarities of their memories. One great advantage of this exercise is that it shows people both their individuality and shared humanity.
I bring the discussion to a close by summarizing how memory can show us our natural use of the senses, how it reminds us of powerful emotions, how it shows us the individuality of our experience. This is where our originality of viewpoint will come from. I emphasize how memory gives us details: the faces in the playground, the toys we had, the mood behind our first journey. There is often a discussion on how memory does not have to be factual, indeed, often is not factual, and that the borders between fact and fiction are difficult to delineate.
Writing from Memory and Difficult Emotions
Final Words on Memory and Using the Senses
One of the outcomes of this exercise is that it produces snippets of very strong writing from everyone, full of richness of detail and sensual description. They can also become the starting point for lengthier stories. For instance, one of my American students wrote about a hospital room where he visited his mother as a small boy. This led him to develop an excellent story about a seven-year-old boy. The story was focused on a room in his home and showed a little boy moving from having a strong relationship with his mother and going through the painful and funny experiences of trying to find some independence.
The short-story writer Flannery O’Connor writes that, ‘Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses.’ In addition she says that, ‘Fiction writers who are not concerned with these concrete details are guilty of what Henry James called “weak specification”. The eye will glide over their words while the attention goes to sleep.’
This is one of the challenges of making writing fresh and interesting: to produce concrete and unusual detail as a way of showing the world. In my experience, returning to use of the senses, again and again, ought not to be underestimated. When we try to write larger pieces, and get focused on ideas and themes, this is the first thing that, disastrously, can go, leaving writing lifeless and unspecified.
What this exercise does, to all levels of writers, is produce a level of rich detail, without a great deal of effort. The freshness of remembered experience can enhance writing, and can be returned to as a way to remind people of the depths that can be achieved if you use details to make your reader feel the experiences of their characters.
Where You’re Coming From
Julia Bell
Most of the inspiration for my work comes about as a part of my engagement with the world in which I live: it’s the things that happen to me that make me want to write. This is not to say that all my fiction is autobiographical. It is not, it is fiction. I make things up, embellish, exaggerate, lie. I remake my world in a new kind of way for myself, in a way that allows me to make sense of things, imagine scenarios, draw conclusions, plot revenges. It is the safest kind of place to explore my own territory, think about the things that bother me. If the writing wasn’t for me in the first place, I doubt very much whether I’d be writing at all.
All of us have experience. It’s the pull, or the fracture, of our formative experiences that often drives us to writing in the first place. When we say that a writer has found their voice, what we mean is that they’ve staked out their territory, they’ve found their subject, as well as a style that will carry it. If you study the careers of most major writers their early novels or stories are often very autobiographical. As if the writer has to write inside out in order to start ‘making things up’. Look for Martin Amis in The Rachel Papers, Philip Roth in Portnoy’s Complaint, Jeanette Winterson in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. These books aren’t true but they are based on true experience, real emotion.
Often writers will start as far away from themselves as possible. But eventually as the writing progresses, the subject circles closer and closer around their own experience, eventually settling on a narrative that carries something of real importance to the writer. To start writing extended narratives, a writer needs to have a subject, a cause, an aesthetic on which to hang their metaphorical hat, and perhaps the most successful of these (in literary fiction) are the ones drawn from a writer’s real-life experience. The only problem with this is that it requires self-knowledge from the writer. It demands that they assess their own experience and look at the world in the light of it.
There are, of course, big drawbacks to this, either the writing becomes impenetrable self-therapy or it becomes didactic, the writer moralizing from their own experiences. How to avoid this? Character. This is where the real task of creating fiction rather than autobiography lies.
The me-replacements in my stories are the most important part of the narrative to get right. They aren’t me, they are fifty degrees to the left or the right of me, but they take my place in the story. I want to be able to empathize with my pro- or ant-agonists. I want them to experience things I have experienced, reflect these experiences back at me so that I can have some kind of insight into the events that happen in my life. In order to do this I have to fall in love with my characters and therefore, narcissistically, with a part of myself.
Try this exercise:
Do this exercise for yourself, and then consider it in the light of your characters. How do they feel about the names you have given them? What do their names say about who they are? If you have given your characters improbable or fantastical names, reconsider them or, at least, ask your characters what they think about it. I read once about a traveller who called her two children Ambulance and Layby after where they were born. I often wondered what the children felt about this and if they would feel compelled to change their names as they grew up. What does it mean to change your own name? What does it say about how a person might try to reinvent themselves, become someone new?
You need to have empathy for your characters, so in some way they have to be like you in order for you to identify with them. This doesn’t mean that you can’t write about any character, but think about why you are writing about them. If you always write about sixty-foot women or men with big muscles, what is it that you are identifying with? Be honest. No one else has to know the answers, but the added layer of self-knowledge will give your characters more impetus and bite. Knowing where you’re coming from is not something that will be immediately revelatory. It takes years, a lifetime even, and there is never any certain conclusion. Like our characters, we can be capricious, elliptical, mercurial, but knowing even this much about ourselves, we are in a much better position to begin writing convincingly about others.