Writing True Stories: The complete guide to writing autobiography, memoir, personal essay, biography, travel and creative nonfiction
352
Writing True Stories: The complete guide to writing autobiography, memoir, personal essay, biography, travel and creative nonfiction
352eBook
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Overview
Writing True Stories is the essential book for anyone who has ever wanted to write a memoir or explore the wider territory of creative nonfiction. It provides practical guidance and inspiration on a vast array of writing topics, including how to access memories, find a narrative voice, build a vivid world on the page, create structure, use research-and face the difficulties of truth-telling.
This book introduces and develops key writing skills, and then challenges more experienced writers to extend their knowledge and practice of the genre into literary nonfiction, true crime, biography, the personal essay, and travel and sojourn writing. Whether you want to write your own autobiography, investigate a wide-ranging political issue or bring to life an intriguing history, this book will be your guide.
Writing True Stories is practical and easy to use as well as an encouraging and insightful companion on the writing journey. Written in a warm, clear and engaging style, it will get you started on the story you want to write-and keep you going until you reach the end.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781000938548 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 765 KB |
About the Author
Patti Miller is an award-winning memoirist and nonfiction writer, whose 2012 book, The Mind of a Thief, was longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Nita Kibble Prize, shortlisted for the WA Premier's Prize for Non-Fiction, winner of the NSW Premier's Prize for History and on the syllabus for English for the VCE in Victoria. Since then she has released Ransacking Paris, 2015, and The Joy of High Places, 2019, to critical acclaim. Her two previous writing books, Writing Your Life and The Memoir Book, have been continually in print since publication. Patti is a highly successful life-writing teacher and mentor who offers courses at the Faber Academy, as well as many other writing centres around Australia and in Paris and London. Her tenth book, True Friends, will be released in April 2022.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Exploring the territory
Knowing our story will help us to know ourselves, others, the mystery of life, and the universe around us better than we had before.
ROBERT ATKINSON
What is it like for anyone to be in the world? This is the vast and private knowledge that each one of us has — and the great mystery. No one else can really know what it is like for you to be here on this planet. Others could conceivably find out everything that has happened to you, your entire history, but they still could not know how you experience being here. For me, this is the starting point for writing true stories: a desire to express how one experiences life — its shape, its texture, its atmosphere — and a consuming curiosity to know how other people experience it.
Whether you want to write autobiography, memoir, travel narratives, personal essays, creative nonfiction, biography or even edge towards the borderlands of fiction, this book will help you write 'true stories'.
You have experienced being here in the world, have known the joys and perhaps heartaches of life, faced challenges, had adventures, fulfilled dreams, witnessed change, made observations — whatever your achievements or trials, your stories are worth writing. You may have worked as farmer or scientist, prime minister or office administrator, high-school teacher or computer-game designer; you may be famous, unemployed, disabled, wealthy; in every case you have lived your own unique life. Experience of living and a desire to write are the starting point of writing your stories.
It does not matter how old you are or whether you have done anything others consider extraordinary or not. Writing is first of all observation, and then putting the observation into words. For good life writing, the quality of your observation is key — it is how you see life that matters, rather than what you have done. Truthfully observing your life and the world around you is the starting point of all writing.
The essential truth is always: what is it like to be in the world? To me, that's one of the most interesting questions of all. What childhood dream, or perhaps dread, led you to this point in your life? What roads travelled, or less travelled, have you taken? What do you believe about yourself? Do you have a compass and if so, what is it made of?
Still, the desire to express experiences in writing is, by itself, not enough. Life is made of days but writing is made of words — can one level of reality be transmuted into the other? Post-modernist thought argues that words can never represent life; they can only represent a parallel world of words, a world of signs. Words are not a 'window' through which we can see reality, they are more like permanent contact lens that construct the world we see according to the colour and thickness of the lens. More than that, the 'lens' also shapes our inner world. Feelings themselves are, to some extent, shaped by words. It is almost impossible to imagine how we could experience the world without language, because we use words to imagine too. Still, acknowledging our 'lens', accepting that words will always form our experience, we can try to set down what we see through them, and how.
Defining the territory
What is life writing? Is autobiography different from memoir? And what is the difference between memoir and 'memoirs'? And creative nonfiction? Briefly defining the territory could be useful before heading off on the journey.
Life writing is a general term that encompasses the broad territory of nonfiction writing on subjects of actual experience and observation, an umbrella term which includes autobiography, biography, memoir, memoirs, personal essay, travel and sojourn writing.
Autobiography is an account of a whole life — from one's origins to the present. It can include some family history but concentrates on the individual life, exploring childhood experience, personal development, relationships and career.
Biography is an account of someone else's life, although it too can spread out at its edges to include elements of memoir. The biographer can become part of the story.
Memoir is an aspect of a life shaped by any number of limitations including time, place, topic or theme. One can write a memoir of childhood, or of a year in Turkmenistan, or of a relationship with a parent. Travel and sojourn writing are also part of memoir, although they have some particular requirements of their own.
The term 'memoirs' has come to mean the reminiscences of the famous in relation to their public achievements. A general or a politician might write memoirs, and in them we would expect insight into military campaigns or political machinations rather than insight into their relationship with their mothers or other aspects of their private personalities.
Personal essays explore ideas in a wide variety of areas — politics, psychology, everyday life — using personal history to elaborate and illustrate the idea. They can also include facts, interviews, imagination, lists — whatever the essayist want to use to develop his or her idea.
Creative nonfiction, sometimes called literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction, describes 'true stories' that use the techniques of fiction — such as scene and evocative detail — and often the narrator's experiences and perspective. It can include true crime, nature and travel writing, some kinds of biography and almost any area of knowledge — history, geography, politics, psychology — as its subjects.
For you, the writer, the definitions and distinctions may not matter until your manuscript reaches the publisher, who will decide how to categorise it.
The reasons why
Asking why you want to tell this story helps you to focus on the task ahead as well as to clarify whether you want to write autobiography or memoir or creative nonfiction.
Lineage and social history
In a culture where social media and television absorb much free time, there is scant opportunity for the older generation to tell family stories. But there is still a fundamental human need to know our lineage, our roots, perhaps because it fills in what would otherwise be an infinite silent blank before our own existence. To place our lineage in context we also need social history, to understand how people worked, what they ate, what games children played. You have probably wished at some time that you knew what your grandparents' or even your parents' lives were really like. This is your chance to speak to the future.
Identity
Who are you in relation to your family, your community, your cultural background? Particularly when you have come from a community that has been oppressed or marginalised, you may be motivated by a desire to explore the identity of your people. Seeing what you are made of — your culture, your family history — can place your own life in a continuum of other lives and thereby create a sense of belonging. It can help both writer and reader find their way.
Healing
The need for healing can come at any time in a life. None of us is immune forever from suffering. It may be death, adoption, abuse, divorce, illness or any other painful experience that jolts or even overturns your life. Because the experience disrupts all of your previous stories, there can be feelings of meaninglessness and disconnection, as well as pain and grief. Writing is a powerful way of weaving all the pieces of your life back together. The act of writing a sentence is an act of making connections and making meaning. The writer Karen Blixen said, 'All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story.'
Wisdom
Nearly everyone wants to share something of what they have learned from living. You may have sailed around the world on your own, lived in solitude in the bush, looked after your Down syndrome son or fought in a war; you have learned something about yourself and what it is to be a human being and that is always worth sharing.
Creativity
To explore in writing the experiences and themes of one's life is essentially a creative act. You may be interested in using the material of your life to write short stories, personal essays or memoir. Exploring the creative possibilities of writing 'true stories' is a return to the regenerative source of all literature.
* * *
There is another motive that needs to be mentioned. Revenge is a motive not often confessed to, but it does at times show through on the page. A writer may feel bitter and want to punish those who have hurt them. Such motivations have an unpleasant way of distorting the writing; as a perceptive student once remarked to me, 'bitterness does not read well'.
These are some of the reasons why 'ordinary' people write, although the more I work with people writing their life story, the more I realise that there is no such category as 'ordinary'. Every life, happy or tragic, famous or unknown, is extraordinary in its own way. I don't even agree with Tolstoy that all happy families are alike. Happiness is more difficult to write about because the processes of growth and renewal are less dramatic than those of destruction, but happiness is as unique as grief.
You may not know why you want to write your story at first. In fact, you may not really know why you are writing until you finish. You may just have a gut feeling that it has to be done, and the reasons emerge as you write. Unexpected discovery is one of the many joys of writing.
But just asking 'why?' is productive. Drop it into your mind and let it lie there uncoiling. It will nudge all sorts of things to the surface to use when you are ready to start. The motive is the coiled spring beneath your writing. It will generate the energy to get you started and it can keep you going when it seems as though the story will never be finished.
Think about why you want to write your life story. Write your motives as clearly as you can on a piece of paper and put the paper above your work table.
Your story changes others
Before the American Civil War, an autobiography was published that changed the life of the nation. My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass was an account of his life as a slave and then finally as a free man. It was one of a number of 'slave narratives' that changed the way people thought about slavery and African Americans. These autobiographies revealed the humanity of each person, connecting each one of their readers as brothers and sisters and strengthening a political movement that, in time, freed men and women from slavery. Douglass's personal story had an enormous impact on millions of lives: it helped changed history.
In Australia, especially in the last few decades, there have been a number of autobiographies and memoirs by Indigenous writers that have articulated and strengthened their communities' sense of identity and started to change attitudes in the wider community. Sally Morgan's My Place, Ruby Langford Ginibi's Don't Take Your Love to Town, Anita Heiss's Am I Black Enough For You?, Jeanine Leane's Purple Threads and Stan Grant's Talking to My Country are all personal life stories, but they are also political in its deepest sense, giving strength and purpose to Indigenous action. These life stories create change in the wider community by replacing ignorance and judgement with insight and understanding.
There are many communities that are sidelined by those in power, marginalised and even oppressed because of their cultural and ethnic background, or because they are disabled, or because of their sexuality, or because they have been damaged by poverty and neglect. Writing about your life, claiming your experience, is empowering, not just for you but for your whole community. Writing your own life is personal, but it can also be a passionate act of commitment to community. Writing your life can create connection, compassion and change.
A confession
I should, here at the beginning, confess the true extent of my passion to know what life is like for other people. The question has been with me since I was a teenager: What is it like for you to be in the world? I feel the hunger to know when I travel on a train, or sit in a café, or stand in a queue at the supermarket. I want to go up to each person and ask him or her, what is it like for you to be here in this world with only a set of stories to guide you? How do you do it? How do I do it?
Life writing is a way of exploring that question. It is a genre wide and deep enough to explore any of the questions murmuring or shouting under a life, flexible enough to evoke both the beauty and the terror of being here. It is a vessel that changes according to what is put in it, sometimes formal and elegant, sometimes laidback and laconic. In life writing you are returning to the well of literature, the place where you are trying to make words say what it is like to be here in the mystery of existing at all.
CHAPTER 2How to use this book
There is no description equal in difficulty, or certainly in usefulness, to the description of oneself.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
This book is for anyone who wants to write 'true stories'. It explores the whole spectrum of life writing, from straightforward autobiography, to memoir, to the complex territory of creative nonfiction.
Life writing is like all creative writing in that it requires art and discipline. The craft and art of words will bring your experiences and observations to life on the page. But it is different from any other writing in that the self cannot be avoided. In reports, academic essays and journalism mentioning yourself is discouraged, but in life writing it is necessary to reveal (or is it create?) yourself as the narrator of a story in which you are also a 'character'.
Each person's story is unique. There is much we have in common, but we each experience these events in our own way. If you are writing memoir, you probably already have most of the material for your book in your memory, although you might not always be fully conscious of it. If you are writing creative nonfiction, you may have research to do. This book is about how to get the material onto the page.
Because you already have the content of your life story, it may seem easy just to write it down. But then you think: where do I begin? What do I put in and what do I leave out? How do I stitch it together? What can I do to make it more than just a list of events?
This book will answer these questions and guide you through writing your story so that it will be exciting to write and absorbing to read. It will extend the possibilities of life writing into memoir, travel writing, personal essay and a variety of creative nonfiction topics such as true crime and nature writing. It will help you get started and, most importantly, keep you going until you are finished. You will soon realise that the journey of writing is just as valuable as the completed manuscript.
A practical guide — The workshop chapters
Writing True Stories has been divided into two parts.
Part one: Starting out presents fundamental skills and issues of life writing.
Part two: Masterclasses extends the basic skills, presents key issues and broadens the genre into creative nonfiction, creative biography, travel memoir and the personal essay. There is also a chapter on publication options for your manuscript when you are finished.
For ease of use, each workshop chapter is divided into the following sections:
• A general discussion of the topic, in which ideas are offered for you to think about, argue with, and be inspired by.
• A reading, consisting of short extracts from published autobiographies, which illustrate the topics under discussion. Read the extracts to see how published writers handle the issues. They may inspire you to try something new.
• Writing exercises of which there are at least four in each chapter, that have all been tested in many workshop groups. You will find that some result in a page or two while others will trigger a whole chapter. Every person responds differently to each exercise. There are a variety in each chapter, and some may be used over and over again, generating a different response each time. Try them one by one and see which work for you.
• Life story writers sections in part one illustrate how the exercises work. They are responses to the exercises written by former workshop members. These are short, many of them written in ten minutes. Read them to be inspired by the writing of 'ordinary' people and to gain confidence in writing your own story.
* * *
You can work your way through the whole of Writing True Stories by starting at the first workshop and working your way to the end. The workshops have been organised developmentally, but if you like, you can also try random workshop chapters as the interest takes you.
Don't worry about how to organise or structure your writing before you start. The important thing is to get started with the exercises, then, after a while, you can think about structure. If you really need a shape in your head before you start, it might be useful to read Workshop six: Structure.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Writing True Stories"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Patti Miller.
Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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