I toggle with both genres : fiction and non fiction. But unlike many writers I know , I find fiction leaves me feeling more naked and exposed . Perhaps it is what we give to a piece of writing—of ourselves—whatever genre they may be, that makes us feel this way.
When writing non fiction I feel strong and affirmative and like my idol Annie Ernaux, I know exactly how to navigate a story. Because by the time I am ready to write it, I understand my motivations well enough. If I don’t, then I’m not ready to write it.
Of course it changes but its core, the motivation that made me start writing it in the first place is strong enough that I can be the charioteer the entire way, leaving enough loose rope for deviations.
I tell it as it is. No drama. No fancy prose to dress the writing. I feel that that takes away something from the heart of the story, a disguise perhaps. I prefer my non fiction plain as can be. As simple in style as can be. Because writing simply as we all know is the most difficult thing to do. If you can write simply an emotional honesty and subtle elegance will automatically follow.
I just use a stiff spine. A strong jaw.
Observations, like Ernaux— the kind that you might think is banal, is what drives the story. The sentences are staccato like, not lyrical like my fiction.
I should mention at this point that I’m also a photographer and have worked on a series of self portraits to document an illness by completely exposing my physical body and posting them unabashedly on social media.
I can do this because when I first started writing, I started with fiction and I felt I’d already taken off my clothes and stood in the middle of a bazaar.
So, it is easy for me to go behind an unfeeling stone wall. I find this stone wall very useful—to use as an armour to tell things just the way it is. To be strong and fearless.
I never worry about the interiority or subtext of my work because I know if I focus on the micro, like Ernaux, like Munro, the macro naturally emerges. So I focus on the minute observations: a piece of paper tossing on the side walk all by itself, a couple holding hands and walking in a dark London by lane. A train passing by or a bus and face in its window that I can never forget. Or maybe it was the way the hand was placed on the windowsill.
Ernaux’s Happening is much like this as she walks along Rue Magenta to go to the hospital to get an AIDS test. She doesn’t need to say she is afraid of being positive. The reader already senses it in her vivid observations. Because when we are afraid, we hide in ourselves and the smallest details balloon, and we become hypervigilant to everything around us. Think of it as a survival skill in moments of severe trauma.
Fiction, for me, is a totally different process. It requires more nuance in a character because although initially inspired by someone I know, they end up becoming an aggregate of many people, taking on their own lives.
It takes me some time to understand who they really are. Sometimes half a story. But it gets easier with practice.
My rule of thumb to really get to know my characters is this: I need to answer three questions about them. If I can honestly do so, then I know them inside out. The questions are:
1. What did they dream of the night before.
2. What was the first thing that came to their mind when they woke up in the morning (need to pee or need to take the dog out …. Whatever…usually something banal) and
3. What thing, if they had it in their life, would make them truly happy.
I call these the basics.
Then of course fiction meanders— a lot more than non fiction does.
It’s a process of understanding who the character is that makes a story successful. Not the plot.
If I have understood whom I write about well, like my non fiction, they become real people with their own peculiar observations and peculiar fears. And again, when you have this conviction in a character, it will show through in the writing. The characters will drive the story. When I first started writing , I used to always worry that nothing was happening in my stories. You’re always told about this word ‘plot’.
I never had any and I was so distressed that I was going to be a failure, but the more I wrote, I realised that there are other ways of telling a story and once I became intimate with my characters, an interior plot emerges.
So don’t worry if you think that you don’t have a plot in that it is necessary. get to know your characters. There’s always an inner plot hidden in their secret, yet to discover lives.