Blogging is nonfiction, creative journalism, sometimes fiction, and sometimes it's memoir on the hoof.
A big question for me when I'm writing about my life is how to handle other people in it.
I usually don't write much about other people because I don't want to use them, or get them wrong.
(I don't much like writing such as David Sedaris's that relies on using other people's intimate lives for material.)
But some people are integral to my life, like my father, and I do want to talk about that, and about them. Then I wrestle with how much I need to expose them in writing to get my story across.
What I wrote yesterday, for instance, was a lot longer to start, with examples to illustrate what I meant by my father not always being "nice." But then I figured my main point was that I couldn't trust him to be nice, and now that he's dead, I'm released from that problem; you could fill in the blanks for the details, which don't much matter.
I'd hesitated to write about that at all, but I was surprised when I told a friend who'd had a good relationship with her late parents that my father's death had improved our relationship, and she burst out, "Me too!"
So, I figure it's A Thing, but not a thing people say much––and maybe simply because of that, it's worth saying, and I should say it.
So I did.
The obituary my sister wrote for our father is a good example of how unreliable memoir is. She didn't end up using Wordsworth, but she did write about our father almost soley from her perspective, with a result so glowing I can barely see the man I knew through it.
Fair enough, it was far more important to her, so I just offered a little editing. I didn't much care what she wrote until she e-mailed the obit to friends, saying we had written it together.
Aargh! Then I was angry that she would present her experience as mine. No!
It was a great reminder of how I want to be careful about how I write about other people.
Related:
From Tracy Kidder's Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction
A big question for me when I'm writing about my life is how to handle other people in it.
I usually don't write much about other people because I don't want to use them, or get them wrong.
(I don't much like writing such as David Sedaris's that relies on using other people's intimate lives for material.)
But some people are integral to my life, like my father, and I do want to talk about that, and about them. Then I wrestle with how much I need to expose them in writing to get my story across.
What I wrote yesterday, for instance, was a lot longer to start, with examples to illustrate what I meant by my father not always being "nice." But then I figured my main point was that I couldn't trust him to be nice, and now that he's dead, I'm released from that problem; you could fill in the blanks for the details, which don't much matter.
I'd hesitated to write about that at all, but I was surprised when I told a friend who'd had a good relationship with her late parents that my father's death had improved our relationship, and she burst out, "Me too!"
So, I figure it's A Thing, but not a thing people say much––and maybe simply because of that, it's worth saying, and I should say it.
So I did.
The obituary my sister wrote for our father is a good example of how unreliable memoir is. She didn't end up using Wordsworth, but she did write about our father almost soley from her perspective, with a result so glowing I can barely see the man I knew through it.
Fair enough, it was far more important to her, so I just offered a little editing. I didn't much care what she wrote until she e-mailed the obit to friends, saying we had written it together.
Aargh! Then I was angry that she would present her experience as mine. No!
It was a great reminder of how I want to be careful about how I write about other people.
Related:
From Tracy Kidder's Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction
Some Basic Rules of Good Behavior for the Memoirist
Say difficult things. Including difficult facts.
Be harder on yourself than you are on others. The Golden Rule isn't much use in memoir. Inevitably you will not portray others just as they would like to be portrayed. But you can at least remember that the game is rigged: only you are playing voluntarily.
Try to accept the fact that you are, in company with everyone else, in part a comic figure.
Stick to the facts.
