The Best Stories Are Yours: Experience and Autofiction

Writers are often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” Answers to the question vary, but one common response is—experience.

Memoirists and fiction writers have a lot in common. Besides the fact that most writers now work in both genres, we share a foundation best described by memoirist Vivian Gornick in The Situation and the Story. “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance … the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say [about the circumstance].”

No fiction genre captures this better than autofiction.

Short for autobiographical fiction, autofiction draws a lot from the writer’s life, especially critical events, turning points, discoveries and lessons. But since autofiction writers aren’t replicating our entire life to create the story, we have more in common with memoirists than autobiographers. We have situations to explore, and we usually have a lot to say about them.

Here are three key features of autofiction:

• Names: The names in our stories may be real, including the name of the protagonist.
• Parallels: There are key similarities between the writer’s life and that of the protagonist. The protagonist may even be a writer, and the story may explore the role of writing in the character’s (writer’s) life.
• Uncertainty: In a genre that already blurs reality, there’s an organic tension over what’s real and what isn’t. This engages the reader in thinking deeply about the work and the protagonist’s (writer’s) life.

Here are three examples of autofiction and why the authors chose this genre:

• On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019): This work by Ocean Vuong is a letter from a son to a mother that discloses a family history rooted in Vietnam; the story serves as a window into aspects of the son’s life his mother never knew. Normally, our parents (mothers especially, in some cultures) tell us our family history and secrets. This work reverses that tradition.
• Every Day Is for the Thief (2015): This bestselling first novel, in diaristic form, by acclaimed Nigerian-American Teju Cole, depicts a young man’s journey to Nigeria to discover his roots. Discovering one’s heritage often generates epiphany, as we suddenly recognize ourselves, for better or worse.
• A Death in the Family (2013): One of The Guardian's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, this novel series by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard examines childhood, family and grief. Even without knowing the details of the stories, the order of the trilogy is telling.

If you’re interested in mining your life to develop a work of fiction, try the dreamstorming technique described in From Where You Dream, by Robert Olen Butler. Here is Butler's general principle:

• Go to your writing space, and give yourself time to remember, to watch yourself move through your life. The journey doesn’t have to be linear or chronological.
• As you recall your life, note critical events, turning points, discoveries and lessons, and why they might figure into your story.

In each case, there is a situation and a corresponding emotional experience that makes the situation memorable, even worth writing about. These are the insights, the wisdom, the thing the writer has come to say about that event. Only you can tell that story.

Resources:

• Elements of Fiction, by Walter Mosley: How to master essential fiction elements.
• From Where You Dream, by Robert Olen Butler: How to use dreamstorming to reveal story and develop scenes.
• Steering the Craft, by Ursula Le Guin: A craft guide to sailing the sea of story.
• The Elements of Story, by Francis Flaherty: Nonfiction techniques that work for fiction.
• The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick: How to compose and explore the events of life.

When Story Speaks: The All-Important Development Draft

It's impossible to build a house without a plan, and most architects need more than one to achieve the results their clients envision. The same is true for writers. No one can accomplish everything—story arc, character development, smooth prose—in just one try.

When writers say they wrote a story in one sitting, they usually mean they did little or no revision while putting the initial concept on the page. While this is a great feeling, a strong first or early draft is still just a beginning. The all-important second or development draft is when the real story starts.

While a story or novel may undergo any number of revisions, there are three basic types of drafts: rough, development and final. The main goal of a rough draft is to capture the concepts emerging from the writer’s imagination while creative fires burn hottest. The main goal of a final draft is polish. The development draft’s main goals are exploration and discovery. Here’s why these goals are important and how to achieve them.

Many writers assume their initial story is the story they’ll end up with. But seeing story this way eliminates opportunities because writers don’t know to look for them. Like experienced hikers, skilled writers keep their minds, eyes and efforts open. Stories can offer up gems if we’re looking for them.

• Step 1 — Mindset: Assume the story you’ve written isn’t the final version. Also assume there are discoveries to be made, large and small. To that end, think through your story and list which aspects you’d like to examine for opportunities.
• Step 2 — Explore: When hikers travel new terrain, they’re looking to learn the surroundings. In familiar territory, they’re looking for what’s different. It’s never the same river twice. Writers can take the same approach by asking one simple question of their main and even secondary characters. What secrets are you still keeping, from others, from yourself, from me as the writer?
• Step 3 — Observe: Practiced hikers know that all areas vary by season, time of day and weather so watchful travelers pay attention to changes in landscape and wildlife. Apart from the fact that vigilance could save their lives, they’re alert to changes because variations enhance the hiking experience.

Writers can take a similar approach by asking these questions of their stories:

• What do I notice now that I didn’t before? How will this impact the overall story and the people in it?
• How might I incorporate these changes to advance plot and develop character at the same time.

When we’re open to opportunities, actively seeking them and turning over rocks to find where they’re hiding, we’re usually (pleasantly) surprised at what we discover. If this means we need to expand the story or flesh out the characters, we may need to trim or remove other aspects.

Just as hikers want to avoid excess baggage, so do we. So do readers. Whether growing our narratives or reducing them, we can’t assume that a strong first or early draft means we’re done. Instead, we can assume the opposite. The strongest drafts often yield the most precious gems.

Happy writing!

The Role of Research in the Art of Fiction & Novel Writing

One reason I started writing fiction was to avoid research. It wasn’t long before I realized that research is an essential tool and skill required for all writing, including and perhaps especially novel writing.

But what is the role of research in fiction, particularly the art of it?

One problem most, if not all, fiction writers and novelists encounter is how to depict a difficult scene where what is happening is illegal, immoral, offensive. How does the writer present the reality, its causes, and its effects, especially when research only underscores that what is happening is wrong?

One role of research is to inform the reality, the verisimilitude, of a scene, a story, the characters. Why are they doing what they’re doing? Where and how did their current actions originate? What caused them? What will their outcome be? But what happens when research only serves to underscore that the scene we are depicting will be difficult, even off-putting, for the audience?

One option might be to discard research altogether and simply write the scene. But when research is viewed as subordinate to and supportive of fiction, particularly the novel, it can do more for the writer than simply provide information. In order to create fiction, even long-form fiction at the level of art, research can inform the writer, the story and the characters. But research must not dictate the characters or the story. Nor should research dictate art.

Rather, one intention of art is to reflect the reality of the world and to elevate and underscore the truth of that reality, in all its beauty and ugliness.

As the Japanese filmmaker and painter Akira Kurosawa has said, “To be an artist means to search, to find and look at these realities. To be an artist means to never look away.”

A difficult subject or story, or difficult characters, are not sufficient cause in themselves to discard their darker side. For one role of art is to say, “This is what is.”

This does not mean that the writer, the artist, should pander to the senses, the desire for stimulation. What it does mean is making use of both light and darkness in our stories and the people in them, as painters such as Caravaggio and Vermeer have done.

The necessary outcome of the use of light and shadow back to back, the chiaroscuro effect, is precisely that we cannot see the extent of darkness unless light is right alongside it, nor can we see the extent of light unless darkness is right alongside it.

World-Building Your Story: Four Key Components

Our world has a lot going on. No surprise there. But stepping back, we could say that our very big (or very small) world has four main components—people, place, period, populace. Depending on the genres we write in, these may not look anything like what we see on earth, but we still need to fully develop each part, for ourselves and our readers.

People
While we’re using the word people here, fiction can comprise any type of living being. One writer created a story world where flowers were the life representatives. Ask these questions when creating and developing the beings in your story:

• What types of beings will inhabit my story world?
• Which characteristics will they share and which will differentiate them?
• What does “life” mean in my story and to those in it?
• How will my characters depend on each other and themselves?
• To what degree will those in my story change, evolve, grow, die, remain the same?
• What effects will these realities have on them and their world?
• How will I address ethnicity, race, diversity, and how does this connect to what my story is about?

Place
Where your story happens can be cosmic and epic, small as a mouse hole, visible or invisible, or anything in between. Here’s what to consider about the place(s) where your story happens:

• Where is my story set? Is it urban, suburban, rural, a combination?
• How well do I know the setting(s)?
• What research do I need to do, and where can I go to find approximations of my setting?
• Why have I chosen these places, and how will they impact the story and those in it?
• How does place fit the theme of my story, what the story is about?
• Does it fit the scope or size of the story?
• Does the setting serve as a metaphor for the theme?
• What is the landscape of my story; what does/do the location(s) look like?
• How will I connect place with those who inhabit it?

Period
On the surface, the choice of when the story is set seems simple. The three basics are past, present, future. But there’s a lot to consider here, too, such as:

• Will I choose only one of these or work with more than one?
• Why am I making these choices?
• How will the time(s) when the story is set effect the characters and plot?
• How well do I know this era?
• If I’m not familiar with it or am constructing one from scratch, what do I need to learn to accurately depict it?
• What does this period look like, meaning the architecture?

Populace
In this case, populace means society and culture. Of all the components, this is perhaps the most intricate and the one most shaped by and responsible for shaping the others. Key components of society include education, freedom, maturity, customs, traditions, languages, values, governance, styles of dress, art, and how wisdom and information are passed along. Here are considerations when building this very important aspect of your story world:

• What place does education have in my story world, and how does it impact life in my story?
• How free is the culture, and will this element improve or decline? How is freedom defined in this story?
• How advanced is the culture, and will it evolve or devolve?
• What are the story’s customs and traditions, and how do these impact those in my story?
• Which languages are spoken, and to what degree do these connect people, separate them, both?
• What are the culture’s values, and where do they come from? Will they change? If so, how? And what effects will this have on the story and people?
• What style of governance does my story world have, and how does this impact life and story?
• What are the styles of dress and art, and how do these reflect those in my story and their values?
• How are wisdom and information passed along, for example, in oral tradition, advanced technology, written form? What do these forms look like?

Answering Tough Questions
The aspects of our world are many and complex. The four main categories of world-building—people, place, period, populace—and the questions surrounding them are meant to stir our imagination as writers so that we create detailed, believable story worlds that captive readers and make us better, deeper writers.

Tips
To personalize and deepen your mapping strategy, add questions of your own. When making choices, ask yourself why you’re making them. The answers to this question, possibly more than any other, will help get you where you want to go.

Resource: Steering the Craft, by Ursula Le Guin, a guide to sailing the sea of story.

Happy writing!

Adele Annesi is an award-winning writer, editor and teacher. Her new novel is What She Takes Away (Bordighera Press, 2023). Adele was managing editor of Southern Literary Review and has taught writing for Westport Writers’ Workshop. She received her MFA from Fairfield University. Adele’s long-running blog for writers is Word for Words. Her website is Adele Annesi. For questions, email Word for Words.

I Can See Clearly Now: Patterns in Long-Form Fiction

Sometimes writers don’t think much about the form a story will take because stories often seem to take on a shape of their own. But writers of long-form fiction should be aware that all stories have a shape, or pattern, and that they can craft and mold that pattern to suit their vision for the work. First, what do we mean by “pattern”?

In the classic reference work Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster refers to pattern as the shape a longer work takes because of the choices the characters make. Here’s an easily recognizable pattern.

Our characters meet, their lives converge, then their lives ebb and recede, with each going their own way. Whether or not we or our readers stop to note the pattern, it draws us in because it's recognizable, and familiar patterns enable us to feel comfortable with the story and the characters, as if we’re traveling a familiar road but with a new group of friends (or enemies).

Then there’s the story pattern Forster calls the "grand chain," where characters appear in short bursts then return for short bursts. Having our characters strut and fret their brief moments on the stage then repeat the action works well in humoristic pieces, where tone and timing are key.

No matter which pattern we writers create, we need to be aware of the following:

• Whether or not a story’s pattern is familiar, every story has one. Many stories have more than one.
• One way to know what our story’s pattern is and how we can discern it is to read the work and mark each major decision the main character(s) make, then track the results or effects of these decisions, asking these questions:
• Do the choices draw the characters closer to each other or disperse them?
• Do the choices strengthen reader engagement or distance it?
• Which of these effects do we want? Which work best for the story?
• Patterns can be shaped. For instance, maybe our characters make a lot choices early in the story but few later on. In a case like this, readers may engage with the work early on and lose interest.
• One way to avoid this is to recalibrate our characters’ choices and where they make them. Think of your car or cell’s GPS. Choosing a route that differs from the GPS’s instructions can alter your entire journey.
• Patterns make a difference—to the characters, the story, the reader, everything. To get a sense of this, we need to give our stories time and distance then come back and read them through, asking:
• Where does my story sag (low interest), lag (lose pacing), pick up speed (mover faster, maybe too fast)?
• To correct these common problems, consider what different choice(s) your character(s) could make at these crucial junctures and how the choices impact the rest of the story.

Patterns appeal to our aesthetic sense because they provide symmetry and enable us to discern the story as a whole. While we writers continually make decisions about what our characters do, the place to rethink our choices and theirs is in revision. Here, we can do what Nathalie Goldberg referred to Writing Down the Bones as “re-seeing” the work and making organic adjustments that enhance the story, maybe even raise the stakes.

So in the classic pattern noted above, what if instead of having the characters meet, converge and go their separate ways the writer decides that the characters never meet. Instead, the main character spends their life seeking the object of their desire. If the story is about someone with selfish motives, thwarting their efforts and showing how the character responds can reveal (show versus tell) just how self-centered they were in the first place. A classic film with this theme is All About Eve.

So how do writers work with pattern in long-form fiction? Consider these questions:

• Have you planned your story’s pattern or simply plotted the story?
• At which points in the story do your characters make life-altering decisions?
• What happens to the characters and the story as a result of these choices?
• How can you tighten the story to strengthen the pattern, for example, by eliminating an unnecessary character or plot thread?

Whether or not we writers plan our story patterns, we certainly have a plan for our stories. The key is knowing that patterns exist and how to shape those patterns for what we want to achieve. Like us, our characters make decisions, then their decisions make them—and more.

For questions, email Word for Words.

Happy writing!

Adele Annesi is an award-winning writer, editor and teacher. Her new novel is What She Takes Away (New York: Bordighera Press, 2023). Adele was managing editor of Southern Literary Review and received her MFA from Fairfield University. She teaches for Westport Writers’ Workshop. Her website is Adele Annesi.

Yearning and an Impetus for Art

Fiction and nonfiction writers frequently push the boundaries of creativity, even those set by Pulitzer Prize-winning writers like Robert Olen Butler, author of From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. Yet, Butler offers practical methods for going from craft to art, especially with the oft-missing element of yearning.

Some form of desire exists in most stories, real and imagined. But depictions of what a person or character desires often fall short because they’re rendered through unartistic forms, such as abstractions, analyses, generalizations, interpretations and summaries. These have their place in writing, but not so much in storytelling, where there are better ways to go from heart to art.

Yearning, per se, isn’t story, but it often drives story, or good stories anyway. When readers are invited inside a character, they start caring about what that person wants and whether she’ll get it. And the deeper the yearning (more in type than intensity) the more artful the story and the higher the stakes. So how does a story reach these goals?

Butler offers the example of James Joyce, who used "epiphany" to refer to the moment in a story when its essence appears. Butler suggests that stories actually have two epiphanies—one at the climax (the type of epiphany Joyce referred to) and one that should happen near the story’s start. Cluing the reader in to what the main subject of the work yearns for adds interest and momentum. And it can raise the stakes. Given these realities, here are two considerations:

• A person may yearn for one thing at the start of a story or novel and find out by the end that he has grown enough to want more; whether or not he gets it is another aspect of the story. The reverse may also be true.
• A character may start with specific desires, peruse them and get exactly what she wants. There is also the possibility of desire within desire, similar to what in journalism is called the "real story." So what a person may seem to want or thinks she wants isn’t what she really wants, and her journey of realization becomes part of the storyline.

Both of these considerations involve discovery and generate natural opportunities for conflict, the lifeblood of story, real or imagined. And the stronger the yearning, and the tougher the obstacles, the more tension and conflict.

One way to raise the stakes in a story and the level of writing is to reveal and explore a person’s intangible longings—for example, for respect, a sense of self as distinct from others, for recognition, permanence or legacy, a place in the world or in the heart of someone else.

Examining these deeper desires in a book or novel opens the door to artful writing. For this, Butler advocates tilling the soil of the writer's imagination and past experience. This allows events, turning points and discoveries—as well as imaginings—to emerge from the compost of memory or from sheer imagination into the light of day before they’re dismissed by the writer's internal editor or shaped by craft before they’re fully realized.

This is where Butler's “dreamstorming” technique comes into play. Here, Butler suggests that writers find a writing space away from distractions and let their minds wander within the context of the story. Instead of immediately stopping to write what emerges, Butler recommends that writers keep pen and paper handy and only jot down a word or phrase to describe what comes to mind so as not to stem the flow of what they’re remembering or imagining.

Later, writers can amplify their notes and recollections into scenes without worrying about what each scene means to the overall work. These revelations usually come in draft two anyway. This is where the writer sees a character's real yearning and can portray it more artfully because the writer’s vision of who the person is and what she wants is clearer. "The point of revision is to find meaning," Butler notes.

Revision also enables writers to recognize and remove the vagaries of abstraction and generalizations, as well as those enemies of story—analyses, interpretations and summaries—in favor letting the people in the story reveal who they are and what they really want, whether they get it all or not.

Happy writing!

Write to Remember, Discover and Learn

Sometimes we write to remember. Sometimes as we write and remember, we discover. 

A writer often intuits when a character in a novel isn't fully realized. And since characters are like actors in that there are no small characters, only insufficient depictions, it’s important to make sure all characters, especially main characters, are their fullest selves. With a little imagination and strategizing, writers can glimpse more of who characters are and render them more fully.

One way to flesh out a scantily drawn character is to put the person in two scenes back to back, the first facing a tough situation alone, then next with others who know the circumstances.

How the character acts and reacts, what they think and feel, in both settings reveals them. You don’t have to retain this order in the final version of the story; it’s more of an exercise to open the character to the writer and, ultimately, to the reader.

This approach also helps the writer determine which aspects and how much of the character to show through what happens internally and how much is better shown through how they act outwardly.

Striking a balance between internality and externality is important. Showing what’s happening to a person on the inside gives the reader insight into the character, sometimes even before the character reaches the same awareness.

When writers face the unknown in developing a story or someone in that story, they can think back to when they were in a similar situation and ask themselves these questions:

• How did they react?
• What did they reveal about themselves when alone?
• What did they reveal when faced with the reality that someone else knew?

Answering these more personal questions gives the writer a place to begin. From there, they can ask themselves how the character is similar and how the person is different.

If the writer decides to incorporate these personal experiences into their fiction, they may find the task difficult. One way to accomplish this is to write quickly through the memories and moments.

In situations like these, writers are free to break the rules, for example, in these ways.

• Tell the story instead of showing it, and use awkward sentence structures.
• If you’re writing in first person and feel too close to the story, try writing what the character is thinking and feeling in third person.
• If you feel too far removed from the character or are writing in third person, try first person.
• To more fully realize scenes, add stage directions. You can remove the scaffolding later.

Once you’ve gone through these steps, put the work aside for a few days. Then, go back and chip away the plaster and dismantle the framework.

You’ll usually find clearer characters, scenes and even settings. And if the story has some basis in fact that is hard to write about, time and distance will help.

Realize, too, that there really is no such thing as going back to the past, even one’s own. It’s never the same river twice. Your story is going someplace new, with new people.

Remember also that the same principals apply in stories as in life. New relationships, especially deep ones, are hard to form. And they take work. And time. And, oftentimes, they're awkward.

Lessons like these harken to William Zinsser's Writing to Learn. In this classic, Zinsser addresses how writing helps people learn difficult subjects. The more clearly a writer can speak to a topic or depict a person or story the more clearly the writer reveals these elements to herself and her readers.

We writers often know when a character isn't fully realized and sometimes tell ourselves they’re only a small character who’s not en scene very often. But these are missed opportunities to enable characters to be their fullest selves.

We owe readers our best. We owe it to ourselves as writers, too.

Happy writing!

Adele Annesi’s new novel is What She Takes Away (Bordighera Press, May 2023).

The Subtle Persuasion of Poetry in Prose

“I'm a failed poet,” wrote twentieth-century novelist and short-story writer William Faulkner, author of Light in August and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Faulkner also said it might be true that all novelists start out wanting to write poetry and when they find they can't, they try the short story. Then failing that, they finally try writing novels. Regardless of a writer’s interest or genre, there’s much to learn from the precision, imagery and persuasiveness of poetry.

Like most people, writers don't have a lot of spare time, and when they do, they may not naturally gravitate toward poetry because they have other projects that take precedence. And for the writer immersed in prose, a poem can feel too much like an alien landscape, an inaccessible world. Yet, poems often have an elemental, Edenic quality that invites readers in and bids them stay a while.

On particularly harried days, writers can find the clean, spare language of poetry to be a balm. Yet, poems can also provide lessons and examples. For instance, one evocative noun can replace a string of adjectives and create a clear picture that opens the door of story for readers. A writer who makes deliberate word choices says, in essence, "I want you to know what this is about, who the people in this story are."

This isn't the same as giving away the entire premise or plot upfront. Instead, it creates an atmosphere of trust that engages readers and encourages them to read on.

Poets often say that poetry is all about imagery. At first blush, may sound like poets craft their pieces only for the senses, not for substance. But when an image accurately conveys what the poet intended, substance is implied.

The corollary for the writer is a well-grounded scene that reveals character and advances plot, preferably both at once. Even misleading scenes, when done intentionally and well, have their place. Where would mysteries and thrillers and thrillers be without them?

One surprising aspect of poetry that's just as useful to prose writers is the artful ability to persuade. Small, subtle words like "so" and "for" and "since", unobtrusive in their commonality, are woven into a poem’s fabric to draw the reader to the poet's perspective. From there, the message conveyed through language is conjured by words that rise gently from the page to form a picture in the reader's mind.

And for poets and prose writers alike, if there is no image, there is no scene, and if there is no scene there is no story.

Often accused of being inaccessible, poetry isn't always understandable. Neither are people, or life. Yet, even when understanding doesn't arise, images still appear, with the intentionality of the chosen words giving those images substance.

Whether we read or write poems, prose or both, less is often more, and in such simplicity one often finds rest. 

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
"Auguries of Innocence," William Blake

Happy writing! Adele Annesi is an award-winning author, editor and teacher. For questions on writing, email Adele Annesi. Adele’s new novel is What She Takes Away (Bordighera Press)