I once had a lovely, wise professor who said, “If you write about a person, tell the truth, and do it with love and compassion.” To show what he meant, he read a scene from one of his books in which he described, in gorgeous language, the boy he once was, his drunken father, and the abyss between them. After he was done, I cried because I recognized myself. I understood each of the characters, what they wanted yet couldn’t have. I felt their pain and love.
This is a good time to mention that great writing is about telling the truth. To have a shot at producing something good, you’ve got to write down the stuff you swore you’d never tell another living soul. This is especially true of memoir, but it’s also true if your manuscript contains a lot of personal narrative. You’ve got to get it all down, no matter how whiney you sound, or bitter. (I promise you, during the process the story will soften on the page.) You’ve got to tell the truth as you see and understand it. If you don’t tell the truth, your story will be dead in the water. You’ll have to take your manuscript into the backyard and bury it because political correctness only serves to keep your reader at arm’s length. They won’t be sure what to think or feel, which will only make them bail.
You’ve got to write as if no one will ever read your words. You’ve got to trust that you’re safe. It’s not like your words are going to be published tomorrow, anyway.
And that statement above will, in all likelihood, trigger fear. The fear of writing about other people and the trouble that may cause is what feeds our procrastination. It’s often why we’d rather clean that disgusting barbecue grill than sit in front of our nice, clean computers. This fear disguises itself as worry– that we’re hacks; that we have nothing new to say on a subject, that we’re frittering away our time on yet another project that we’re never going to see to completion.
But it’s the fear of telling the truth.
Here’s the scoop: As writers we want to stick to the truth as closely as possible, unless of course we’re writing fiction. Often we can disguise the identity of those we write about, particularly if we’re obligated to guard their privacy, by changing the name or gender, and switching up a few telling details. Don’t think that in order to get to the heart of the story you have to out others. Here’s where things can get tricky. If you’re writing about your past, it’s pretty hard to camouflage the identities of key players in your life. You can change his name to “Bob” and throw a cowboy outfit on him, but we all know you’re describing your alcoholic father, or that brother who ended up in prison. You can’t fool us, or them. And rare is the family member who’ll take kindly to your version of the truth, or to having their secrets revealed.
It would be great if you could leave these “sensitive” people off the page, but they’re likely a major driving force in your story. Come to think of it, you probably wouldn’t be telling this story if it weren’t for them. Hey, as the author, Anne Lamott once joked, “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.”
A word of warning in the form of another useful piece of advice: While you write, when you’re most vulnerable to criticism, protect yourself by keeping your manuscript to yourself. Don’t foist it onto friends and family members. Do NOT ask for their opinion. This is the single most effective way to shut yourself down. First of all, some ideas shouldn’t be shared until you’ve had the time to reconsider them, to develop them, to allow them to soften so they don’t read like psycho-therapy rantings. Secondly, you may get your nose out of joint by their lack of enthusiasm. If you’re lucky.
Which leads me another point: Not everybody is your audience. Your kids, your parents, your second cousin twice removed, some of your friends, may not like what you have to say. They may criticize you, and that’s OK. It’s normal to feel defensive. It takes guts to face into that. But after you’ve thought about a chapter in your life, examined it from several different angles, reconsidered certain events a thousand times, the need to justify your position will begin to dissipate. Especially when you recognize that your real audience is desperately waiting for you to put into words what they’re feeling, what they’re yearning to hear. That what they need most of all is your truth. Your truth told with love.
As the author Richard Bausch once said, “There are people out there suffering the wounds and sorrows and terrors of existence who do not have the words to weather it, and it is the writer’s place to give expression to that part of experience—to provide a sense of what Joseph Conrad called the ‘solidarity of the human family,’ and to give forth nothing less than the knowledge that no one, in the world of stories and of art, is ever totally alone.”
