Once you have the makings of a moral code – what you believe – you may feel compelled to tell me about it. Unfortunately, outside of a Ted Talk your audience doesn’t want to be lectured. However, when what you believe arises from what you feel about what you’ve experienced, you will find ways in your writing to tell us what you want us to know.
Here we wander into memoir, but this applies to fiction as well. Memoirists want us to know what they’ve experienced, what they feel about it, what they’ve learned, and what beliefs they have adopted. This might involve anything from vacation travel to the death of a loved one, with the important distinction of context. In essence, context tells the reader why this story matters. Without context, a list of your experience will read like an itinerary, whether you traveled through Morocco or a funeral home. With context, such as a new strongly held belief or a human truth, mistakes to avoid or conduct to emulate, you have a unique personal story with a potentially broad application.
For our purposes, I’m bypassing books that lean academic. If you have a special expertise that you’d like us to know about, please write something for us. But those books tend to be more technical in nature, less involved with personal experience and feelings, and that’s the path we’re taking. In this post, I’m talking to the writer who wants me to know about traveling through a foreign country or navigating the healthcare system. You want to document, create order, add context. You want to find closure and find community with people who have lived through the same experiences.
Sometimes, the writer wants to confess.
Writer Julie Powell broke through with her first, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, in which she wanted readers to know what it was like trying to cook every receipt in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. A travelogue through a cookbook, not a country.
But her much darker follow-up, Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, Powell wraps the story of her apprenticeship at a family-owned butcher shop around her confession of her ongoing betrayal of her husband via a long affair with a former lover. I don’t know why she wanted us to know that, but she did. And that half of the book reads essentially as confession, with several thousand readers in the other side of the box.
Powell does not try to explain the affair or make excuses. She gives no reason for it, other than physical obsession. She doesn’t pretend that it’s love. Her husband is aware of the affair but she neither ends it nor asks for a divorce. She provides no context, such as a midlife crisis or rocky patch in her marriage. There’s no resolution. Powell’s affair eventually peters out, but she still longs for it. Her marriage does not end, but she doesn’t express any regret or admit she’s learned anything about herself.
You too can write what you want me to know, your adult version of What I Did Over the Summer. You can educate us about something you know or somewhere you’ve been. You can tell us about someone you knew. You can tell us about the worst days of your life and tell people experiencing something similar that they aren’t alone and that they can survive it too. If, like Julie Powell, you’ve committed an intriguing sin, you can confess.
Like most fiction, most memoir is uplifting. Even if there is no happy ending, there is resolution. There’s hope. But also like fiction, memoir can be a downer. It can end ambiguously. It can end without answers to big questions. And that is true to life. We behave in ways we can’t predict, ways that contradict our morals and beliefs. We hurt people we love. We don’t learn lessons. We don’t find our motivation. We don’t resolve our backstory wound. We simply are, and sometimes that’s not attractive.
While memoir is more suited to writing what you want us to know, it is not uncommon in fiction. You simply need to hide it a bit better and aim for the right audience.
Here I’ll dip back into the well of Anne Lamott for some examples of how she used both fiction and memoir to tell her readers what she wanted them to know. Anne Lamott frequently speaks of writing as a gift. She wrote her first novel, Hard Laughter, as a gift for her father, who had been diagnosed with brain cancer and would pass away not long after she completed it. It was also the book she wished she had been able to read during this difficult time.
- She wanted her dad to know that his life mattered, that he would live on in his children and in this book after he died.
- She wanted him to know that she had inherited his talent for writing, that his life mattered to her specifically, and that she had skills to carry her forward. She wanted him to know she’d be alright.
- She wanted the next family to know what they might face after a similar diagnosis, that it was ok to laugh in the face of stress and grief, and that everyone has their own way of coping. She wanted that family to know they weren’t alone.
Similarly, Lamott’s Operating Instructions was the memoir she wished she could read, about being a single mom, both during her pregnancy and in the first few months of her child’s life. As she wrote, her best friend and main support person Pam was diagnosed with breast cancer, and the memoir became a document of Pam’s journey out as well.
- She wanted to her son to know what it was like for her to be single and pregnant, and excited and scared. She wanted him to know where he came from and about the people who helped along the way.
- She wanted other single moms to know about post-partum depression and stress, about puke and not having time to shower, but also about the overwhelming feeling of love she had for her new little person, and that most of the time, the good days outweighed the pukey days.
- She wanted other new moms to know that they did not have to do it all or even half, and that some days simply keeping the new little person alive was the best they could hope for.
- She wanted her son to know Pam, who would die while he was still a toddler. She wanted Pam’s young daughter to have honest, loving stories of her mom’s life, so that she could know her as well.
As an art form, memoir can be daunting. I doubt I could write one. But there are other forms of writing that can express your desire to tell us something important. Write a poem or song lyrics. Write a short story or start a blog. Write a letter to someone you love or a future generation. Write to your past self to explain what went wrong or what went well and what you learned from it. Start simply and move forward.
Write fiction. Kurt Vonnegut wanted his readers to know that war is awful and that life is absurd, but worth living. Margaret Atwood wants her readers to know about the strength of women, their depth of character, their capriciousness, and their struggles. Matt Haig wants his readers to know that being alive, in the body and life you have right now, is pretty great. The comics writer Warren Ellis wants his readers to know that the world is weird and that being weird is wonderful. Toni Morrison wanted us to know about the complex realities, internal lives, and communities of Black Americans, particularly of Black girls.
None of them preach, but they all showed us what they wanted us to know.
Movie mogul Sam Goldwyn famously (allegedly) said “If you want to send a message, try Western Union.” And he was partly right, because modern audiences don’t enjoy morality plays. But he was also mostly wrong, because every story has a message. Every writer wants you to know something. This desire informs their choice of characters, genre, theme, and story.
What I’d like to impress on you is that you can make a conscious choice to tell me something, you can communicate with me with intention, or you can wing it, pretend you don’t have any message, and tell me something anyway. I believe you will find your writing more powerful and more meaningful, and you will feel more motivated to create, if you make the conscious choice to tell me something.
“I want you to know this,” is a bold statement, but then so is “I’m a writer” and you’re already doing that.
Everything you need to create stories is already inside you. You may need to invent some characters or a science fiction world or a murder puzzle, but everything that will make your story come alive, everything that will ensure your story is uniquely yours, is already there.
Next week, we’ll look at permission again and crank it up to 11.