Pitfalls of autobiographical writing, part 1

As I've indicated before, I'm not prone to write autobiographical work, and not because my life has been boring. Far from it. Rather, I see certain difficulties in working directly with the material of my lived experiences. In an ongoing series (though not likely to be sequential, based on my track record), I'd like to address some of those difficulties as I see them.

Verism vs. verisimilitude
(Can you tell I've been having fun with the dictionary today?)

One of the core pitfalls of autobiographical writing is feeling tethered to the sequence of events as they actually happened. I've done a critique for a friend who has the makings of an excellent children's book, but a few stanzas have her in knots because she insists on clinging to details that are important only to her. They add nothing to the story, don't fit her meter or rhyme and have only kept her stuck, stuck, stuck. I'm not sure how to help her, other than point out that she seems to equate fictionalizing with lying. Her conscience feels keenly there is something deeply unethical about making things up.

I'd call this impulse verism, ("truth theory") from the term applied to a period of "warts and all" art in late republican Rome. It is, if anything, an ethical stance that the armchair psychologist in me sees most often in Meyers-Briggs sensing temperaments. You know, the folks who are rooted to the here and now, and tend to choose careers in math and science. Sensing types are deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of untruth.

Verism's biggest flaw, however, is that it insists on minutiae that obscure rather than clarify the truth. Because to tell your story true in a way that reflects its real meaning and depicts the core emotions, you have to eliminate a lot of what really happened. Real life is messier, more complicated and more cluttered with unnecessary details than quality fiction. Recreating Grandma's parlor in loving detail might give the readers a slice of the real, but unless those details add up to something important to the story, you've lead your readers further from the truth. They'll feel either cheated or bored with your self indulgence.

Instead, one should strive for verisimilitude--the appearance of truth. Achieving this requires winnowing away all but the shiniest thread of narrative, all but the most representative of incidents, all but the most telling of details. Some engineering and editing and fabrication will be necessary to make that happen. Of course, it takes a certain amount of distance and perspective to do this. I'll take up that topic later in the series.

Keats's famous line "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" ("Ode on a Grecian Urn," l. 49) is a pretty convincing argument to get past the fearful clinging to "but this is what really happened." Remember as well that Jesus's most powerfully truthful teaching was parables--fictional stories like the sower, the prodigal son, the ten bridesmaids. The parables clarified his message and made truth so sharp it could penetrate his listeners' usual defenses. The best fiction acts in the same manner.

Have you struggled with verism? What helped you overcome it?

Categories: autobiography, truth, writing craft