Autobiography:
Clutter & Anecdote

I’ve devoted some time to autobiography because one finds so much of it in novice fiction. The examples above demonstrate that autobiography can lend authenticity—either in the form of a grace note or notes, or by supplying the whole cloth from which a work of fiction is cut.

42}GILDING LILY:
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CLUTTER

However, presented with their own lives as material, most beginners will fail to separate the wheat from the chaff, if only because there’s so much chaff and so little wheat.

In a story about a woman tormented by the solitude she experiences in her new setting, we learn several facts: Before coming to New Mexico she lived in “a city where even the secretaries have bachelor’s degrees”; she earned her graduate degree in medieval history from Columbia University; after graduating she worked as a bartender; she practices astrology, reads Milton and Blake, and has a talent for wine-tasting; and until her sixteenth year (when she moved in with her senator uncle in D.C.), she lived with her grandparents on their Kansas farm, where she befriended a domestic goose named Gertrude.

Even after learning all these things about Lily, by the time her story ends we still feel we don’t know her. We don’t know why she left the East Coast, or how she ended up in the desert of New Mexico, or why—having come there—she feels so unhappy. What brought her to her present circumstances?

What usually gives autobiographical content away is that it serves no clear purpose in a story. Specific details like these, concerning a character’s interests and her background, ought to furnish us with strong clues as to why a character has ended up where she is, who she is, and possibly even where she is heading. Such facts must be carefully selected, not snatched at random out of an autobiographical grab bag. Even assuming that all these facts have been chosen with some purpose, there may be too many of them. They tumble over each other like lobsters in a tank.

The great challenge in using autobiographical material lies in knowing what to use and what to throw out—or save for another story or novel. Since each of us has access to a virtually endless supply of experiences and anecdotes, as soon as we open the floodgates to autobiography our choices increase by an order of magnitude.

And since all art is about making choices and thereby imposing limits, autobiography makes the artist’s job not easier, but harder (see Meditation # 1).

Of course, our own lives are all we have. Everything we write must be, to some extent, autobiographical.

There are two approaches to working autobiographically. One is to begin with the autobiographical incidents and events of our lives and, by focusing, inventing, and embellishing, turn them into fiction. Thus, shapeless reality takes on the shape of meaning, colored by theme.

The other approach is to begin with an idea and “grow” the story from it, like the culture in a petri dish, with the author’s autobiographical experiences nourishing his themes as they emerge. We take from our lives exactly what we need for our stories, and no more. What isn’t supplied by life is supplied by our imaginations.

But on the whole when it comes to fiction it’s better to reverse the formula, with life supplying only what isn’t supplied by the imagination.

43}THE LINGUISTICS PROFESSOR:
WORKING FROM ANECDOTE

Then there is the risk of anecdote, which happens when episodes or events are served half-baked from the autobiographical oven, slathered with detail but lacking thematic or emotional relevance.

The word anecdote is defined by Webster’s Eleventh as “a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident.” While a plot may be built around an incident or incidents, anecdotes are mere transcriptions of such incidents with no purpose beyond amusement. In a work of fiction, characters are revealed, deepened, and often (though not always) altered. An anecdote reveals and alters nothing.

Real life hands us countless situations and incidents: anecdotes. It’s up to us to turn those found objects into stories, to shift them from “what happened to me on the way to [fill in the blank]” into something else entirely, something where the emphasis is no longer on the novelty of the incident, but on the characters to whom the incident occurs, and the meanings that they—and our readers—extract from it.

In Paul Bowles’s horrendous story, “A Distant Episode,” a linguistics professor traveling in southern Morocco is set upon by Reguibat tribesmen who cut out his tongue, enslave him, and turn him into a kind of performing clown, covering him with bits of shiny metal and making him dance and mumble incoherently for their amusement.

Reduced to this pithy description, it’s easy to imagine how Bowles’s story could have started its life as an anecdote, a bizarre tale related over glasses of mint tea in a Tangiers rug shop.

Yet as written Bowles’s story is anything but anecdotal.

The Professor ran beneath the arched gate, turned his face toward the red sky, and began to trot along the Piste d’In Salah, straight into the setting sun. Behind him, from the garage, the soldier took a potshot at him for good luck. The bullet whistled dangerously near the Professor’s head, and his yelling rose into an indignant lament as he waved his arms more wildly, and hopped high into the air at every few steps, in an access of terror.

When read in full, the story’s shocking conclusion strikes us not as a gratuitous event, but as an inevitability born of the professor’s Western chauvinism and other damning character flaws.

Anecdotes amuse us for precisely the same reason that they don’t work in fiction: because they’re arbitrary, accidental, without precedent, significance, or meaning. Until it undergoes the necessary transformation, an anecdote is the antithesis of fictional art, which at best comes with layers of meaning and a sense of inevitability.