Right now I’m in the midst of sorting through a bunch of short stories I’ve agreed to help judge for a local magazine’s short fiction contest. As I read, I’m often reminded of a question I got from a member of the audience at Politics & Prose, my invaluable neighborhood independent bookstore, where I discussed The Mother Daughter Show last month.
“How did you manage to write fiction about something based on your own experience?” a woman—herself a writer—asked. She explained that whenever she’s tried to do that, the result has been unsatisfying.
I knew just what she meant. When I first started writing fiction (short stories, inevitably, since that’s what almost everyone starts with), I had the same problem. Something interesting, or traumatic, would happen in my life, and I would think: great material for a short story! But what I wrote always ended up sounding more like an essay.
Judging from the submissions to the short fiction contest, a lot of aspiring writers out there have the same idea I did. I can sniff out pretty easily which of these stories are thinly veiled, or even not so thinly veiled, versions of Something That Really Happened. Some of them might have worked pretty well as essays, but they just don’t make it as short stories.
Why? It’s hard to sum it up in a few words, and of course it varies in the details, but for one thing, the narrator or main character—the one whose point of view we get—is often something of a cipher. Or a noble or virtuous person pitted against others who are obviously in the wrong.
We all have trouble seeing ourselves objectively, portraying ourselves as three-dimensional people with quirks and flaws. But for fictional characters to come to life, they need those quirks and flaws. The reader needs to see them whole, and if the writer is too identified with a character—or can’t really separate that “character” from herself—she won’t be able to create a portrait that comes alive. (That’s not to say the “character” of the narrator is unimportant in an essay. It is, and even when we’re writing as ourselves, we have multiple selves to choose from. But in my view, it’s not as important in an essay as it is in a short story.)
Then there’s the matter of plot. I’ve always found creating a plot for a short story kind of challenging, myself—you don’t have much time to develop something, so you have to know that you’re not biting off more than the story can handle. But many of these Something That Really Happened stories don’t bite off enough. They’re more like vignettes, or slices of life. Or what happens is predictable: boy meets girl, for instance, and either loses her or gets her. Obviously, some of the world’s greatest stories have that plot as their basis, but it’s a question of what the author does with that skeletal outline that makes the story great.
When you start out with Something That Really Happened, it can be hard to wean yourself from that Something. And sometimes, for the sake of the story, you need to. The fact is, life rarely hands you a good plot.
So how did I manage to write what I hope is a successful novel based on Something That Really Happened? As I told my questioner at Politics & Prose, first I had to write about something removed from my own experience—something that couldn’t possibly have happened to me. The first time I tried that, I wrote a short story based on something that had happened to my father when he was a child—but something that I knew little about and, since my father had already died, I couldn’t ask him about directly. In other words, I forced myself to make stuff up. And to get myself even further removed from reality, I set the story not in the 1930’s, when it would have taken place, but in the 1960’s. I’m not saying I hit it out of the park, but that story was the first fiction I ever got published.
I got more practice making stuff up when I set out to write my first novel. Again, I had a factual framework of sorts—a bunch of 18th-century letters I’d come across. But, again, there was no way I could figure out all the details. I had to make stuff up.
When I started writing The Mother Daughter Show, I knew I had to be careful not to let it slip into an account of Something That Really Happened. So, for instance, I deliberately made one of the characters—the one who was closest to being me—as different from me as I could. I made her Italian Catholic instead of Jewish, gave her long dark hair instead of short red hair, gave her three kids instead of two. Those might seem like trivial things, but they helped to establish a separation between her and me. I also gave her a background in advertising instead of law, but later on—for purposes of the plot—I had to make her a former lawyer like myself. Still, while she does say and think things that I’ve said and thought, she’s definitely not me. (The other characters say and think a few things that come from me, too.)
Even so, I found out relatively late in the writing process that I needed to do more. In coming up with a plot, I had hewn too closely to Stuff That Really Happened. While the mechanics of a group of mothers planning a musical revue may have been fascinating to me, and perhaps to a few others who were involved, other readers found the accounts of meetings and rehearsals tedious. Other things needed to happen—things I had to completely make up. Shoehorning a new plot into an existing one wasn’t easy, but it had to be done.
As with just about everything in writing, none of this is set in stone. Maybe you’re one of the rare people who’ve had an experience that will make an amazing short story—or even a novel—with hardly a tweak. (By the same token, merely making stuff up doesn’t guarantee that you’ll end up with successful fiction—there’s a lot more involved!) But in general, my advice to a beginning writer who wants to turn his or her life into fiction comes down to the opposite of “write what you know.” First, write what you don’t know.