They Know You’re Lying
After He Said Cancer | Memoir Update
It’s a warm Friday afternoon in Seattle on a holiday when I should be taking a break from the writing and hustle-bustle that defines my usual week. But, I can’t.
Although my memoir is complete, and I am knocking on the (email) doors of literary agents, I am not truly finished. While I wait for responses, I am doing what any recovering work-a-holic academic would do. I signed up for more school.
One of my summer courses is called Bringing Characters to Life taught by Erin Swann through The Writer’s Workshop at Authors Publish. I am loving the course, and thought I would share some takeaways.
The first session asked a deceptively simple question. Who? Not what happens, not where, not why. Who is this person at the center of your story, and why should a reader spend hours of their one precious life with them?
I thought I knew the answer. My characters are real. I am real, for better or worse. My husband Chris isreal. Surely that solves the believability problem.
It does not. Here is what I am learning.
Nobody cares about your story
Our instructor opened with a line from Matt Bird that stung a little. “Nobody really cares about your story, they just care about your hero.”
At first this felt wrong. I have spent five years shaping the story of a cancer diagnosis, a marriage, a family holding on. The story felt like the whole point. Yet, there was something about this that held my attention. Think of the books you love. You may forget entire plotlines, but you remember the people, their problems, their flaws and triumphs.
Story comes before plot, and it belongs to one person, the protagonist. Everything else in the book exists to serve that one person’s inner journey. A plot is a list of events, ingredients in something larger. You cannot choose your ingredients until you know what you are making, and what you are making is a person the reader will follow anywhere.
This has a practical edge for anyone querying agents. Generic, underdeveloped characters are red flags that can earn a fast rejection. An agent reading fifty queries in an afternoon is not looking for a clever premise. She or he is looking for a protagonist in whom they can believe.
Who were they before page one?
Your protagonist arrives on the first page carrying deeply held beliefs that the story will force them to question. Reading this, I thought about the woman I was the night before Chris said the word cancer. She had firm beliefs of what was right and wrong, and the beauty of medician and science to believe. She believed that competence could protect her family. She believed that medicine would have answers, almost always. She believed that love and fighting for your loved ones and your beliefs were nearly the same thing.
My husband’s diagnosis did not create those beliefs. It put every one of them on trial and forced me to rethink who I am.
If you are writing fiction, this is the work. Your character lived a full life before your novel began, and the plot cannot challenge beliefs that do not yet exist. If you are writing memoir, the work is excavation rather than invention. You have to be honest about who you were before, even when the protagonist (me) has deeply held beliefs and flaws that are not the most flattering to put on the page.
Believe, care, invest
Readers need to believe in the reality of your hero. They need to care about the hero’s circumstances. And they need to invest their hopes in the hero to solve this particular problem.
Believing in the protagonist is the foundation, and it is harder than it sounds. Readers open your book knowing that you are lying (if writing fiction). I would hope that they know that I am writing the truth, as the book is a memoir, but there are plenty of famous examples of authors bending the truth in memoir and getting called out on it (James Frey’s 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces, and even Belle Burden’s recent memoir, Strangers). The reader isn’t rooting for your character on page one. They are auditioning her, deciding whether she is worth the time and the ride.
So how do I win over a jury that is deeply skeptical about my character, and whether my story is worth many hours? Authors need to share universal details to let readers see themselves in your character, the dread before a phone call, the grief at a bad diagnosis, the ‘aha’ moment before a discovery.
Specific details are the ones too odd to be made up. Anyone who has read my posts about our mischievous dog (Phoebe), or my interaction with the oncologist after Chris recovered from his blood clot, can understand that there are details in these stories that are stranger than fiction. Real life is honestly, very strange. Fiction, and even memoir, has to be, too.
Four aspects of believability
Our instructor broke believability in the protagonist into four parts. These are the parts that I will be excavating to make sure that they are covered in my memoir. Does my protagonist have a full life? A fully fleshed-out world? Does she have behaviors that everyone can relate to? Is her personality (oddly) specific and believable?
The last one is where I have been lingering, because it comes with such a useful checklist. Does my protagnoist have a unique way of talking, an oddly specific backstory, flaws that are the ironic flipside of a strength, secrets which reveal a gap between a public identity and a private self, a stubborn streak or odd habit, strong beliefs to live by, specific tastes….
I have all of these, but the question is whether I have showcased them adequately in the memoir. If I am to write the memoir well, I need to write specifically about the characters.
More soon from my summer of school. The memoir may be finished, but clearly the writer (I) am not.
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