January 3, 2022
Every Book Is Autobiographical – or Should Be
(Auto)biographies, autobiographical novels, “based on a true story”… There seem to be many ways of more or less describing the same thing. At least that’s what one may think. However, in actual fact, all these are very different modes of writing, with unique requirements. More importantly, for the purposes of this post, most people seem to ignore a very crucial thing: Every book is autobiographical!
This might feel an obviously wrong thing to say. “Hang on, Chris”, you might think. “How on earth can every book be autobiographical? What about American Psycho, or even some science fiction – say, Solaris? Surely, you’re not claiming that Bret Easton Ellis has killed people or that Stanisław Lem traveled to another planet?”
The answer is – to the best of my knowledge – no. Yet both these two examples, just like every other book ever written by any human is deep down an autobiographical book. The reason?
Because every author, even when writing fiction, puts a piece of themselves in it.
Or at least, they ought to! Because about the only way to fail entirely at writing fiction is to not allow yourself – your subjectivity, your experiences, your flaws and vices and insecurities – to become part of the narrative. Writing an autobiographical book the way I just defined it is the easiest way for any author (and especially so for less experienced ones) to introduce affect in their narratives.
Let’s see why that happens and how to control it.
When it comes to all books being autobiographical, it’s not out experiences that are important, but remembering and reflecting on our experiences
An Autobiographical Book Is about Experiencing
Note: I’m using the term “autobiographical book” simply as a reminder of my thesis – i.e. that you must allow yourself and your experiences to become a part of your narrative. Otherwise – as I argued – every book is an autobiographical book!
Remember my post on memory and why it’s a great thing for an author to have? I then said the following: “experiencing becomes an operative element [of writing]: before you write you must experience. Writing and memory, therefore, go hand-in-hand”.
Another post you might want to read if you haven’t is the one on imagination and creativity. Here we find the following excerpt: “Imagination in creative writing is your understanding of how your own experiences allow you to situate yourself in a context: other people (and their experiences), the world, life”.
Putting these two elements together, we reach an arguably bold but important conclusion: Writing an affectively engaging narrative requires an understanding of the connection between your experiences and others’.
In simpler words: You can’t write a novel without reflecting on your experiences.
But there are several misconceptions lurking in the literary shadows, so let’s dispel them before they take root.
Affect and Autobiographical Elements
You might have heard of the “write what you know” mantra. If you’ve been following my posts for a while, you likely know my opinion of mantras and one-size-fits-all solutions: They’re usually wrong, very often misunderstood, and virtually always overused.
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions, no shortcuts, no simple answers, and definitely no authorities in writing. There is only one mantra in art: “Play Write from your fucking heart“.
And so, with this in mind, to say that writing a novel requires reflecting on your experiences does not mean you should “only write what you know” in terms of plot. It most certainly does not mean that you should only write about New York if you’ve been there, that you should only write a horror story if you’ve actually seen a ghost, or that you should only write protagonists who are like you.
It’s not the Experience, but Remembering and Reflecting
The protagonist of The Perfect Gray is a woman; that of Tell Me, Mariner is a sailor. I have no knowledge of either experience, but that didn’t stop me from writing these narratives. Yet both Hecate and The Mariner contain parts of who I am. That’s what makes them realistic.
It’s not our experiences that make a novel autobiographical; it’s remembering and reflecting on our experiences. Consequently, having met the President, having traveled to Polynesia, or having built a robot are, by themselves, pointless. It’s your affective reflection what counts, and that can be inspired by all experiences – even so-called mundane.
Indeed, because the vast majority of people have not had experiences are rare as the examples above, it’s perhaps even more important to be able to write based on “mundane” experiences, as such a narrative is more likely relatable.
But how, exactly, do our own experiences – what makes an autobiographical book – translate into affect?
How to Control Your Experiences in an Autobiographical Book
At the end of the introduction, I promised you I’d explain two things in this post:
- why putting yourself in a narrative is the easiest way to add affective impact.
- how to control the process.
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the answer is common to both these questions.
The reason putting yourself – your thoughts, fears, emotions, outlook – in a narrative is affectively… effective, is that you have unique access to your own mental processes. Each one of us has no way of knowing what others really think (or, hell, if they even exist), but we do have exceptionally vivid, deep knowledge of what, why, and how we think and feel.
Putting that into words (to the extent it’s possible) is a great start for character complexity – and hence realism – interpretative ambiguity, narrative authenticity, and ultimately relatability. These are all affective attributes that are highly important in literature.
Connections and Relatability
To put it simply, you want to create characters and narratives that, while appearing unique and original, allow your intended audience to feel a connection. Plot won’t give you that – all plots have already been devised. The way to originality is through reflecting on experiences.
As to how to control the process, you might have already guessed it: They are your thoughts! Neither I nor anyone else can know what it feels like to be you, yet you do. Managing to express that in writing means you have taken a giant leap learning how to control affect.
Writing an autobiographical book – that is, affectively putting yourself in the narrative – means you know why the protagonist said A while she meant B. You know why the antagonist undermines the protagonist although he loves her. Ultimately, you know what it feels like to be in the protagonist’s shoes, because you’ve been there – you understand all the nuanced feelings, all the ambiguous dilemmas, all the complex thoughts involved.
To know is to control.
Yet there is one prerequisite.
It’s All About Affect; and Self-Awareness
The prerequisite in writing autobiographical books – in the context of putting yourself in the narrative and thus enhancing its affect – is that, when it comes to experiences and reflecting on them, you must know where and how to look for them.
This might sound a bit harsh, but a writer who doesn’t know how to reflect on their experiences will have real trouble writing anything worthwhile. The reason is multifaceted, but ultimately simple: Without reflecting on your experiences, you don’t have access to the world; to what connects you to other people, humanity, life in general.
Have you ever listened to a rich celebrity or politician talking, and every single word they say makes you think they’re completely disconnected from reality, as if they didn’t understand what real people have to grapple with?
Same thing.
A writer needs to reflect on a rainy day, and what it would feel like not to be in a warm cozy apartment. They need to reflect on holding their smartphone, and what made it possible. A writer needs to remember their childhood, reflect on it and (just adding a challenge) reflect on their reflecting on their childhood.
Writers don’t write texts; they translate experiences.
4 Comments
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We writers should contain multitudes. The process of dividing the riches into smaller piles to be gifted to our characters makes us look at them in detail – there is relatively little space in fiction, even at GWTW length – so you can emphasize a number of characteristics in individual characters, and choose sets which give you conflict.
In ourselves, we suppress parts we are less happy with, or don’t have a good presence in society – those parts are where our serial killers and other baddies come from. It’s fun to give them free rein before we store them back in the vault.
Even the good parts can be unequally distributed – so we get to play with what would happen if we let, say, the charitable impulse get out of hand.
I do it deliberately – control and choice are important for the writer – and there is always a way to get microtension out of an interaction even between mostly similar characters.
Maybe it’s best that my family haven’t taken to reading my fiction much or deeply! They’d know a lot more about me if they paid attention. But it’s not MY fault – it’s right there in more-or-less plan English.
There are many intriguing things hiding in plain sight, indeed. But, as you said, the important prerequisite is to pay attention, something most people aren’t very good at. Quite often I tell people that good books aren’t about larger-than-life plots but about uncovering the meaning (“translating the experience”, to use the same terminology I used in the post) that exists in everyday interactions that pass entirely unnoticed. Ultimately, a writer is someone curious enough to pay attention. Thanks for your comment! 🙂
On the other hand, writing itself will transform the writer and what they thought they ought to write. Thus, to write is to give public form — language, shared by all, owned by none — to private experience. To publicize one’s experiences means they won’t be one’s own any more. To face the written page, thus, means to lose one’s experiences some way or another, by virtue of how languages work as public intermediators. In order to share one’s own experiences, one has to impose on them the restrictions of one medium (media) or another. Yet, at this very moment, one is also distant from one’s own experience, thus, despite being less intimate with it, one is also more aware of it, rendering possible a critique of it. Thus, writing transforms the very experience while publicizing it. Therefore, the written experience differs fundamentally from the unwritten one. As Fernando Pessoa wrote:
As we’ve said before, writing is a bit like the observer problem in physics: How do you perform the experiment without polluting the results? How do you write about an experience without fundamentally altering the nature of the experience (by incorporating your current reflection)?
I think the answer to the predicament is understanding that, deep down, there’s no such thing as “private experience”. We think we possess experiences, whereas in actual fact they possess us instead – and yes, here one can freely understand the verb “possess” in religious terms as well. The writer is taken over by a force, “by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand”, to quote George Orwell.
So, perhaps to face the written page is not to lose one’s experience but one’s illusion of possessing the experience!