August 2016 - Ann Henry Editor and Author

Don’t Just Tell It Like It Is

When you are writing a memoir, blog, or other autobiographical material, treat it like a work of fiction inasmuch as the prose matters. Don’t equate basic honesty with detailed accuracy. While the former is admirable and even desirable, the latter could cause you to lose your readers.

Consider, for example, that you wish to relate the story of a pet pig that follows his human companion around the house, calling her Maa-maa. Does the reader really need to know that this vocal little pig belongs to your uncle’s ex-wife’s sister-in-law’s niece Rhonda, a person you met briefly only once and who will never again be mentioned in your memoir? Probably not. So why bore your readers by beginning your charming little story with “My uncle’s ex-wife’s sister-in-law’s niece Rhonda once had a little pig…”?

Since the point of the story is the unusual behavior of this pig, that is what you need to be honest about. (Don’t claim this story is true in an autobiographical account if it is not.) Your relationship to the human involved, however, is of no real significance, so here you may take literary license for the sake of brevity, smoother prose, and preservation of the reader’s sanity. Simply begin your story with “A friend of mine once had a little pig….”

Was Rhonda truly your friend? Maybe, or maybe not. Does it really matter? In relation to the telling of this story, not a bit.

Likewise, if you have always used your parking brake when parking your car on a hill except for one time when you forgot, must you include that snippet of accurately factual information when making the point that you “always” use your parking brake in such situations? Only if your story involves the one time that you forgot and what comic or tragic occurrences resulted from that momentary lapse of memory. Otherwise, it is of no significance.

There is no need to clutter your prose with extremely detailed accounts of events merely for the sake of “honesty” in autobiographical works. My high school chemistry teacher told the class that if we ever saw the words always or never on a true/false question on a chemistry test, just mark it “false” because there was no such thing as “always” or “never” when it came to chemistry. Your readers probably never knew my chemistry teacher, and your memoir is most likely not about chemistry, but I think it is reasonable to assume that our readers realize that “always” and “never” statements are most likely exaggerations that fall under the umbrella of literary license and therefore should be considered “acceptable” even if they do skirt the truth just a bit.

Sure, we read for facts and insights, but we also read for pleasure and entertainment. Try not to let strict adherence to the former spoil the latter for your readers. Go for the romance.

Creative Writing

Write What You Know

I must be a born rebel. (Well, I am a Mississippian and I did graduate from Ole Miss…) When it comes to fiction-writing rules, I just can’t seem to help but break them—at least some of them, at least some of the time.

“Write about what you know about,” the old saying goes. Every writer has heard it at least a hundred times. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean, how can you argue with such obviously sage advice?

You can’t. Because it’s good advice and we all know it. What we don’t always know is exactly what it means to “write about what you know about.” Does it mean that if you are a man you can never write about a female protagonist? That if you live in the 21^st Century you can’t write about ancient Rome? That if you are forty years old you can’t write about someone who is eighty?

Obviously not. These excursions into the unknown have been accomplished quite successfully time after time, by many different authors at many different times. But can a southern American novelist write convincingly about a male Australian architect when said novelist is a woman, has never studied architecture, and has hardly ever even met any Aussies, much less been to Australia?

Well, one doesn’t know until one tries, right? And in my defense as the author of such a novel, I can only say that it was a great relief when Alan, an Aussie architect I became friends with soon after I had finished the first draft of A Bit of Sun, read it and told me no one would think I hadn’t at least lived in Australia for several years. But the real kicker was when Tess, my British agent who had been married to an Aussie and had lived in Sydney for three years, assumed upon reading the manuscript that I, too, was an Australian.

Still, one of the most emotionally scary times of my life was when Alan, who was now helping me vet the book from a male Aussie architect’s point of view, told me he didn’t like one of the early scenes in the first chapter. My main character, Britt, was not well-defined, Alan said, and didn’t “feel right” to him. He suggested I rewrite a portion of the scene, which involved getting directly inside Britt’s head. While I, with more than a little trepidation, set about doing so, Alan remained in the adjacent room, waiting for me to finish.

Talk about pressure! Here I was, a mere woman, trying to think the most intimate thoughts of a young Aussie male. What hubris! Whatever had I been thinking to write such a book in the first place? And now I was going to have to show these intimate thoughts to this man I barely knew in person. Oh, please, never mind that we are on the second floor. Just let the floor open up and drop me down now.

But of course the floor held firm, and there seemed nothing else for me to do but get on with it. And so I did.

Thirty minutes later I presented my handiwork to Alan and held my breath while he read it. And then—wait for it—miracle of miracles, he looked up at me with a big smile on his face and said, “Yes. That’s it. You got it.”

Sometime during those years when I was writing this novel that I supposedly shouldn’t have been writing, I heard a radio interview with a famous author whom I had read and admired say, “To write about what you know is to write what’s in your heart.”

Yes, of course, I did a lot of research before writing A Bit of Sun, but I don’t think that is what made it seem authentic to Alan and Tess. What made it seem honest and real was not that I was writing about “my own backyard” but that I was writing what was in my heart. And if you do that, you can’t go wrong—no matter what anybody else says.