It's your story to tell...

Every family has its stories, every family has is tragedy and its triumph - but are they a gift for the budding story teller, or are they like the holiday snaps of story telling, something best kept to the people who were there?

One of the biggest issues with using family stories is that often they can form something more of a straight jacket than a scaffolding.

Many people come to classes wanting to write what is in fact a memoir, and the problem with this is that a memoir, by definition, is not fiction. Remember all those TV dramas that are ‘inspired by real events?’ The word that is doing the most heavy lifting here is ‘inspired by.’ It takes huge amount of skill and experience to take real events and make then into readable fiction - it’s not impossible and often creating stunning drama - but it’s far harder than creating fiction. 

I see it all the time in my classes - people will come with a great family story and will hold us enthralled with the drama of it, why their Grand Dad married a woman from such a different background to his, how they happened to buy ticket for the Titanic that day, why they managed to survive - and yes, it is gripping stuff - but the big problem comes when you start asking them questions like ‘why’ did these thing happen, why did these people make the decisions they made - because the first response you get usually is ‘I don’t know.’

The big problem is that while we accept that the decisions people make in real life happen because, well, they happened, and even if they are illogical, that is what they did, in fiction if people start make decisions your reader doesn’t come to understand, just ‘because they do’ most readers will find this unsatisfying. The least satisfying stories in fiction are ones when the characters act in service to the plot, and if you don’t know what I mean, think of the last time you were unable to suspend disbelief and shouted at a Netflix drama ‘oh come on, why would they do that?’ Or ‘That would never have happened!’

The trouble with real life is that it rarely plays by the rules that make fiction work, but the irony is that because fiction plays by these rules, it often touches us more deeply and with more truth than a real life story.

The other problem with drawing too closely on real life stories, especially negative experiences, is that they can be more benefit to the writer than the reader. I am sure every one of us, myself included, has had terrible experiences in life and ones that will of course be reflected in what we write. But when we are close to something so intensely personal, it is very hard to make it into good fiction, not least because it can be very damaging to the writer. If a reader makes a perfectly valid observation that something isn’t convincing, or they didn’t care about the character - if that character is us it can hurt more than is good for us.

This leads me to a key point — in your first draft the main characters are very often your avatar in the world of the book. By the time we get to the published book - the main characters need to be the avatar for the reader to inhabit, not the author. The problem with sticking too rigidly to a family story if you are not writing a memoir, is that you cannot have enough distance from the material you are using to give your reader a way into your narrative. They will always remain a person on the outside hearing a gripping family story, which ultimately they will not have any deep connection to. They will not have any skin in the game, as they say. Think about that friend who insists on telling you the latest drama at their work, where Barbara from accounts got drunk at the Christmas party and snogged the officer junior - sure, it’s a great story, but unless you know these people personally, there is only so much you care. Good fiction doesn’t just tell your reader a story, it makes your reader part of the story they are reading. 

I’m going to show you a little example of how drafting a story works. 

You may not know this, but the tale of Cinderella had gone through several iterations. There are Cinderella type stories throughout most human cultures, all of which have infinite variety and cultural references, but all of which usually have similar elements of a maiden of low birth, who when seen for her true self by a Prince and is rewarded for pure heart by marriage.

The Disney tale we know now, is a softened version of the one originally told by Charles Perrault - which in turn is a version of one with a much bloodier finish. In that, when the Prince comes round with the shoe, the wicked step mother encouraged one daughter to chop off her toes so she can get the shoe on. The Price assumes he has the right bride, only for Cinderella’s friends the bird to fly around his carriage, pointing out there is blood in the woman’s shoe anh he’s been tricked. The Stepmother tries the same thing with the other sister, until he finally he finds the real Cinderella. The Wicked Step Mother and daughters are then further punished by being made to wear shoes of red hot iron and dance at their wedding - so you can see perhaps why Disney and other retellings have dropped this perhaps overall spiteful ending. 

However, one of the earliest version of the story, told by a Greek Story Teller named Strabo, Cinderella is a courtesan, or a sex worker, who was bathing at a pond when a cheeky bird flew down and picked up her shoe - notice how the birds are still part of the story, we could go on here about how birds are often seen as agents of fate in mythology but we won’t - the  bird takes this shoe and flies away with it, only to accidentally drop it into the lap of a Prince. Luckily he’s a foot fetishist, so is intrigued as to how delicate and small the shoe is, and decides that he will marry the woman it fits. He travels the land to find her, and has no issue with her lowly status so fixated he is by her feet, and marries her - the end. 

Now - this is very much the first draft of the story as you can see, and doesn’t that feel weirdly un-satisfying? The girl does nothing but have small feet and bath near a lot of shoe obsessed birds, she doesn’t earn her fate, she has no agency. The Prince is only interested in her feet, he has no opinion about the rest of her, and she is an object, or pair of objects. But as people retold the story, they began to give us cause and reason, Cinderella has a backstory, the tragic loss of her mother and her Father’s feckless remarriage and emotional distance which allows her to be treated a servant in her own home. In the later stories, she even tries to create her own dress with there help of mice and birds and so forth, in order to give her agency in her story and to justify why woodland creatures are so fond of her. 

If you’re drawing on family stories and personal experiences, and you are not writing a memoir, then these are your raw material, not your finished product. My strong advice is to write your story for yourself almost as an act of therapy - and it is a really valuable one - and then put it in a drawer. To make fiction, you need to distance yourself from it, so that you can pull the underlying theme and and core of the experience, and find a way to use its power without being hamstrung by its facts. You may end up using some very accurate historical details from your life in a book, but you have to be willing and indeed want to always sacrifice what is not serving your character or plot or structure, to make good fiction. Sometimes you are the darling you need to kill.