I am an awful storyteller. My cousin reminds me of this everytime I start to tell him a story. I fumble, forget the sequence of events or the punchline, and worst of all, I feel like I need to relay every detail of the episode. I'm plagued by an overactive conscious. I can't lie!
While reading King's On Writing this week, I kept coming back to the discussion we had at the beginning of a semester about truth in writing. As a kid, I was told over and over not to lie, the sentiment deeply ingrained in me. Now, as an adult, I can't lie even in certain kinds of writing like memoirs, which require the occasional betrayal of truth. In the beginning of the book, King confesses to the reader that his memory fails him, that he cannot remember certain details. In other momoirs I've read, the author doesn't admit to such faults but instead fills the gaps with half-truths or probabilities.
Perhaps, this is the key to good storytelling: knowing when and how to lie. Perhaps, this is what my storytelling is lacking. I focus too much on telling the event faithfully, as it happened. But, I guess, that's also the difference between a storyteller and a reporter. People's expectations for a storyteller and a reporter differ; from one they expect entertainment, from the other, the facts.
As I begin to think about my classes in the future, I think that it would be interesting to explore this issue of truth in writing further. In the meantime, though, I need to learn to lie.
You should read Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. She takes the time to write in between her chapters about what she for sure remembered and wrote down accurately, to what was sort of fuzzy for her, etc. I think it would be really useful to help you cement your thoughts more!
ReplyDeleteI faced similar challenges when I was writing my memoir. I only really remembered a couple details of my memoir, and then after a few weeks, I realized that I needed 5-8 pages, so I had to make up some details and I hated doing it, but it actually did make my memoir better. I guess that's why they call it creative non-fiction.
ReplyDeleteI had a very similar process with my memoir, and I discovered to my delight that I could be creative and perhaps "lie" or at least manipulate the truth in my memoir.
ReplyDeleteTake lying as an encouragement to be creative, to come up with something new and exciting...that's what I do
Alex
I think there is a difference between out and out lying and crafting details that might not have happened exactly that way in order to advance the greater truth of what you are trying to get across. If, in my memoir, the high school English teacher who instead of teaching writing, had us build motorized model cars, and instead of reading Hamlet, told us again and again of a pitcher from the 1927 Yankees, if that person was actually a composite of two or three different teachers, instead of one actual person, is that lying?
ReplyDeleteYou may have already read it, but Tim O'Brien's novel The Things They Carried has a section that addresses this idea really explicitly and does a really great job of freeing authors from feeling as though they have to tell stories exactly as they happened.
ReplyDeleteThat first book we read had great comments from all sorts of memoir writers who talked about this- the creation of memories not really there or editing of them to make the story. I was a journalism major for a semester, did horribly for my instinct to go off topic with stories and dropped the major. I remember writing this piece about Pagliai's Pizza and all I wanted to write about were the boys and men in the window with their paper hats and aprons- as if a scene out of old sepia photograph you find in your grandmother's photo album. I was lost in my own scenes and imagined details that I forgot to tell the news piece! I think if we as writers can learn to do both and use them when needed, then we would be in a good position.
ReplyDeleteExploring the truths in writing would be really interesting. Like you claim to be, I am a terrible story teller. Friends roll their eyes at my stories because they never seem to end. One thing leads to another and it is rare that I finish a story exactly like I would have expected. For better or worse, in many ways, it's the same way I write.
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