When Memorists Deceive

Woman Reading with Tea, Henri Matisse

If a story were ever to be written truthfully 

from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.

                                                                          Henri Matisse

We all know the stories--"memoirs" that are partially or completely fabricated. Some manuscripts initially submitted for publication as fiction got no bites, so the writers labeled them nonfiction and publishers bit. For decades news journalists have been exposed and censured for inventing "facts" and events of all sorts. Although misrepresentation of the self in various degrees is fairly common among humans, committing it to print is irreversible. 
     Why? Why write fiction and call it nonfiction? One answer is that it's easier to get nonfiction published and sold than fiction. Dishonest writers who don't have the skills to make facts appealing on their own can embellish easily. Or the cause is laziness and the motivation simple self-aggrandizement, hope for high sales or notoriety. 
     So part of the challenge for the memoirist is to keep the line between nonfiction and fiction distinct, to respect life experience and write honorably. It's said that God doesn't write good drama. So, because our lives often seem a series of random events, memoir writers have to craft personal experience into something God might have written (had she been so thoughtfully inclined) while still maintaining the integrity of actual experience. 

Woman Reading with Peaches by Henri Matisse

     So much has to do with the implicit contract of trust between writer and reader. So much depends on the writer's intent. Readers need to recognize and depend on a narrator's sincere purpose. Matisse also said, "Creativity takes courage," a quality that's in short supply in our world nowadays. 


Please share your thoughts on this sticky subject. my ideas here are preliminary musings, but I need more perspective--so fire away. In other words, go ahead and COMMENT herein.


Next week: Techniques for keeping nonfiction, not fiction--respectfully and honorably

Note: 
I'm in Italy this week teaching memoir writing at 
The Heart of Memoir Writing Workshop in 
Santo Stefano di Sessanio in Abruzzo. 
This week I'll be posting photos of our work and play on 
Facebook at Eat, Travel, Write Italy & France. 

The Genre: Narrative/Creative/Literary Nonfiction--Which Is It?

Charles Mingus, Jazz Composer and Bassist

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; 

making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

                                                                                                 Charles Mingus

AS it has always been, our genre is named after something it's not, rather than something it is. It is not fiction. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the genre has evolved in the past fifty years into a blend: factual reporting enhanced with something like fiction (but definitely not fiction). 
     In the1960s and 1970s, along with much else in our world, cold, hard-news fiction transformed into a more human form. Called The New Journalism at the time, nonfiction was defined as writing that "not only seeks to explain as well as to inform; it even dares to teach, to measure, to evaluate."
     As a child and adolescent, I read only fiction--and biographies. Other nonfiction writing seemed distant and academic, news-oriented and analytic. But in the mid 1960s, Truman
Capote's In Cold Blood served, at least to me, to make nonfiction suddenly sexy, and completely compelling. Reportage became story.


What we're talking about is labeled, variously, narrative, creative or literary nonfiction. 
     It's narrative because it tells a story and has the general components of a story arc--rising action, climax, denouement. Children acquire a "story sense" around two years of age; by three they can tell a story--true or not--that has a beginning, middle and end. And a point. Composing life experience with the story arc of fiction allows us to engage our readers on a human level. Life experience doesn't occur, however, in neat story arcs. That's why writers craft life events into memoir.
     It's creative because--in addition to reporting facts--creative nonfiction writers employ the techniques of fiction writing: scene, dialogue, setting, characterization, interior monologue, for example. The creative nonfiction essay, story, or article appeals to readers because it reads somewhat like fiction. The facts are structured and organized in order to appeal to a reader's innate sense of story.
     It's literary because the writing has the definitive elements of literature: "excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest." It is literary when the writer composes the narrative using creative techniques with the intent of satisfying a reader's need to understand the world and human relationships more thoroughly. It's literature when the writer composes beyond mere plot, or, in the case of memoir, beyond mere life event. Life experience can be made into art, the angle of the writer's perspective highlighting significance. And when the writer simplifies the extreme complication of human life, her writing benefits everyone who reads it. 


This post is mostly thinking out loud, then writing to figure out what I think to see if it makes sense. Writing's good for that--composing forces us to clarity--at least for the moment. Let me know if it's clear and makes sense. Add your perspective here, your understanding of the memoirist's task, through your lens. I'd love to hear it.


Next week: Thoughts about deception in memoir writing.

Research Your Travel Essay--Part II

Carry A Notebook
Always carry a small notebook to document, document, and document some more.

• Record overheard conversations that strike you as interesting or revealing of cultural distinction.
• Record your reflections about the effect of a place: a few sentences about how a place makes you feel, and how that feeling connects to other experiences you've had. 
• Write down proper nouns and adjectives from a tour guide's speech; that way, you have precision in the basics and can later research to find out more.
• Document the sounds, smells and visuals everywhere you go. Do it on the spot or at night, collected and documented in the tranquility of your room. 
• If you're lucky enough to be the recipient of a song--as I was from a group of children wandering home from school in Samoa--breathe deeply, listen carefully, and when they finally wander off again, madly scribble down every word and lilting note. Collect stories about encounters with children, and you'll have a lovely tale to tell. 
• Sketch, rather than photograph an interesting doorway, an intriguing shape in a painting, a table and chair sitting empty next to you in a sidewalk cafe. (Sketch while you sip and nibble, and you will live longer.) Tuck a tiny set of watercolors into your bag to create quick, colorful impressions. You will be amazed at how quickly the mood of such an encounter is preserved and recalled each time you look at the sketch or small painting.

Collect Ephemera

• I bring home paper coasters, ticket stubs, hotel stationery, postcards, business cards, and such. I still use a paper coaster from Soba, an Indonesian restaurant in Amsterdam where my mother and I dined with our tour guide twenty-five years ago; it reminds me of how much she enjoyed the multilingual tour guide's lively company. Every time I see the illustrated exhibit ticket for a Bonnard and Matisse exhibit at Victor Emmanuel Monument Museum in Rome pasted in my notebook, I laugh remembering the guard who flirted with my friend, telling her that he "wanted an American woman because Italian women were too expensive." There's surely a story there. 
• Take, buy and carry maps of your destination. Collect hand-drawn maps from hotels, tourist kiosks, and restaurants. use them for guidance and keep them for information and illustration. 
• I still have a small poster advertising a Parisian book fair that I noticed in a bookstore window twenty years ago. Because the fair had just ended, the shopkeeper gave me the poster. It shows books stacked on a chair in an ancient library and the phrase, Vous etes chez vous, which, though I know better, I've always translated as, "You are most at home with yourself and books."
• A business card in Italian, taped in my 2011 notebook, reminds me that Marcello, who is most likely the kindest cab driver in Rome, speaks fluent English. And now that I think of it, I have some stories about other cab drivers to tell--that one in Samoa, named Rambo, who offered a tour of the island, and the family man in Washington D. C. whose zestful narration sparkled with pride in "his" town all the way to  BWI. These stories would make a nice "round up" travel article that shows how the real flavor of a city reveals itself in a speeding yellow cab. 

Keepsakes are for keeping and reminiscing--and for sharing too.

Talk to Locals, Ask Questions, Listen

When I was a child in the 1950s, probably about ten years old, I wandered around Balboa Island (Southern California) one day when kids could still do that and came upon an old Craftsman bungalow with a broad front porch facing the bay. 

The wide painted railings surrounding the porch and many wood shelves contained dozens of jars of sea specimens--jelly fish, octopus, sea horses and so forth, all floating in formaldehyde. I was fascinated and spent many hours that summer talking to the old man about his life-long collection. That experience probably initiated my own life-long love of he sea and its gifts. Although I don't have an actual photo of his specimens, the one in my mind is crisp and fresh. You can get good information and enduring memories from local residents. 

Go With A Purpose

Decide on a focus before leaving on your trip (and leave leeway for changing your mind). You might plan to "research" local weekend markets in Barcelona, or study the methods of cappuccino-making in Rome, or test all seven Paris city walks that the guidebook recommends. After such concentrated research, you're ready with a topic for a travel article, one about food centered on the variety of greens Barcelonans cook with, another concerning the saucy language of Roman baristas, or a delicious analysis of the flakiness of Parisian croissants determined through pointed visits to every boulangerie on each of the seven walks!

That's it--plan now, keep records, compose in tranquility. Buon Viaggio! 

Research Your Travel Essay--Before You Decide What to Write

It's great when a travel story--even the entire narrative--burns into your consciousness on the plane ride home. And it does happen. But, as someone told me recently, good luck comes from good planning. So if you want to write a travel story after your summer travels--whether you travel around the block or around the Mediterranean, think ahead and collect details purposefully. It could be those details tell you what to write.

Here's the first half of "Eight Tips for Researching Your Travel Essay--Before You Decide What to Write."


PAY ATTENTION
Be sure not to ignore critical advice from rodeo photographer Louise Serpa who cautions us: "Never don't pay attention." She, of all people, knew that if you don't pay attention for a brief second, you will surely miss the cowboy's slide into the manure or the clown's slide into the bull. 
So keep your eyes and ears open, watch the cobblestones, and remember the writer's mantra: Everything is material.

TAKE PHOTOS OF PEOPLE 
Rather than more typically shooting monuments (you can find better ones online), take photos of local people doing their jobs or carrying on activities of daily life. Catch the barista making your cappuccino in Venice, boys playing soccer in the piazza in Monti, very old women working at a construction site in Bali, transporting dirt in baskets balanced on their heads. 
Capture the triumph of cooks in a tiny trattoria in Florence (who clearly added zing to that sauce). Seize the moment the nonna sits down to rest after making the day's pasta in Portavenere. 
Ask first. If you tell people you will be writing about their town, they will most likely open their arms and you might embrace a memoir essay.

PHOTOGRAPH SIGNAGE 
Take photos of significant wall text in a museum, hotel signs, handwritten warnings ("Don't Tuch!" outside an Amsterdam museum). Great stories can come from small incidentals.A favorite photo in my album is the Lucca train station because its sign brings back good memories of  an entrancing walled city where late one night college-age boys called out  "Lucca, Lucca," the humor in their voices echoing back and forth across piazzas and winding streets. I was never sure whether they were touting their town or searching for their buddy, Luca. 


PHOTOGRAPH THE UNUSUAL  

Notice the plethora of three-wheel trucks in Sicily, entrancing door knockers in Barcelona, flowers spilling off balconies in San Miguel de Allende. Find a holy niche in nearly every corner in Florence and preserve the Madonna in all her incarnations as she watches over the stony streets. 
A thematic collection of such photos can illustrate an article you might eventually write describing the change that came over you as you strolled the streets of distant towns. 

Next week: 
All about notebooks, ephemera, 
chatting up locals and finding a 
purpose before leaving home.