It’s February vacation this week, so here’s an old but still relevant musing of mine. The post was originally published on my blog in 2018. It has been edited and updated to reflect my experience publishing a [very honest] book of nonfiction.
An observation, over many years: when I’m in the zone, when words arrive and settle on the page, it’s because I’m writing honestly. They’re neither “good” nor “bad,” they just are. There’s nothing to force, because the story that wants to be told is outing itself. There’s no resistance.
Writing honestly means allowing the story to tell its truth. Some days that’s easier than others! Some days it’s downright impossible. There are so many forces at play that keep us away from what we really want to talk about on the page. We seek ways to be faithful—to fictional reality or to real life, or to the story world’s logic, to our (or our characters’) long-held and cherished beliefs—but when it comes down to it, writing a good story is not quite as simple as intention. (Intention helps, for sure, but it’s not everything.)
Writing a good story requires loyalty and precision. It requires deep listening. It also requires vulnerability.
Nonfiction writers, when asked to push deeper into a scene and really uncover what they’re trying to say, often ask: Don’t I have to be honest?
Equally common is the the statement, from fiction writers, when something is flagged as not quite resonant in a story: But that really happened!
These moments are two sides of the same coin, and they point to some obvious differences in genre, but more interestingly, they point to a similarity that exists between writers of any creative genre. This similarity is the core complexity underwriting (no pun intended!) the power, function, and importance of all storytelling.
Honesty = Truth | Honesty ≠ Truth | Truth ≠ Fact
First, I’ll clarify a bit.
When I say, “writing honestly,” I am talking about something slightly sideways of telling the truth. Honesty can reveal truth, but sometimes it obscures it. (How it does this is topic for another post.)
When I say “truth,” I’m not talking about facts.
Facts are the domain of biographers, historians, and scientist. All noble professions that use facts to tell a story. When done well, these stories reveal a truth, something that exposes the human condition or grapples with the unknowable nature of the universe. This is by no means a requirement for this kind of writing. Sometimes factual writing is just factual.
Truth is its own realm. (Picasso: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”) Truth in art can be and should be and is directly related to honesty. But it exists apart, too. Truth holds its own, plays by its own rules, and isn’t entirely concerned with fairness. (Twain: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”)
In writing, as in life, your truth is subjective. It depends on weather, emotion, mood, relationship, where you’re seated in a room, whether or not you’re hungry, etc. Truth is influenced and flexible; a shapeshifter (that’s not what we want to hear, is it?!); feral, a bit demanding, often uncomfortable.
And—
Truth is a requirement for good writing (of any genre).
Writing a story (writing an honest story; honestly writing a story) requires a certain distillation and manipulation of the truth. How do you or your POV character witness the story you’re trying to tell? And how will you show the reader a faithful replica while also telling a good story?
Here are a few of the tricks I use when I can’t find a story’s true north:
1. Deep Imagining: This is a term I picked up from Claire Davis in grad school. Deep imagining involves really inhabiting your story, from the roots up. It involves knowing much more about your characters than what they present on the page. It involves knowing the composition of dirt beneath a character’s feet. It involves getting down into all sorts of fun, messy stuff, and then resisting the urge to put every single detail on the page, and instead put only the details that reveal the truth of the matter on the page. (Note: This was presented to me as a fictional craft tool, but I’ve found it equally useful in creative nonfiction. For XO, I drafted what I now refer to as a “source document” in which everything I could remember, even the most tiny, seemingly insignificant detail, was placed. Most of it didn’t end up in the book. But it certainly informed the overall feel of the book.)
2. Take a breath, or tune into your gut: This is much simpler sounding than it actually is. Most of us don’t want to sit still with the truth (or with anything else for that matter!). We avoid listening to our gut. It’s (part of) why we love technology: it’s an endless distraction. It’s (part of) why so many Americans have digestive issues: we don’t want to hear the wisdom our guts hold. But sitting still, breathing in (and out), holding quiet space for what you might not want to understand—this action, when done regularly, can open up the door to a newfound honesty, and if we’re lucky, clues on how to best tell the stories that haunt us.
3. Assess it askew: You know how at night, you can see better from your peripheral vision? Writing honestly is like that. If you try to approach the truth dead-on, you’ll likely not see it clearly. Find ways to get sneaky, stalking around its edges, until you can behold it. Listen to it with your eyes closed. Put a scent or a touch sensation to it. Truth is a shy beast (ironic, right?), and it wears many faces, and it’s up to you to figure out how to find it and hold onto it.
In the end, only the story matters
Jonathan Gottschall: “When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless. ”
I’ve been surprised, since XO’s publication, how many people have asked me if the book is partly fictionalized. At first, I wasn’t sure if I should take offense at this question—like, was my honestly being called under scrutiny? But, I realized something pretty quickly: the question arose out of the book’s ability to drop readers into the story and make them forget that it actually happened. (For the record, though, the book is entirely nonfiction, and as accurate as my memory allows.) Now, when this question of fictionalization is asked, I take it as the highest compliment.
In the end, as a writer, your primary duty is to the story. Not to yourself, nor the people populating the page. Not to facts or “that really happened.” Of course these things should be given consideration, but they’re not the main focus. (This is a hard reality to confront, especially when writing personal essay or memoir! It’s the reason I don’t write about my husband or kids, beyond brief mentions.)
Is your story approaching truth? Are you writing honestly?
You’ll know when it’s happening, because even if it’s a struggle, the end product is transcendent.
Writing honestly makes space for the story to tell itself, to reveal its truth, without agenda, without distracting flourish.
These are the stories that resonate with us, long after we read them.