The writers of I Love Lucy put a new twist on Emily Dickinson's “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” when Ricky critiqued Lucy’s novel-in-progress:
Ricky: But honey, it isn’t true!
Lucy: Ricky, that’s what writers do, they take the truth and twist it a little.
(audience laughs)
Fred: Well, if your book doesn’t sell, you can always get a job making pretzels!
(big yuks)
When you write fiction or poetry based on memory, you differentiate between the experience you had and the experience the poem or story will have. Even if they are consistent, they will likely not be congruent, as you select from, reshape, and re-proportion the material. You chisel away what was in the experience that isn’t in the story. Be careful not to take out essentials, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. (But if you are writing about a baby taking a bath, don’t throw out the bathwater.)
Some writers are blessed with great memories. Thomas Wolfe could remember watching his sister climb a hill on her way to school when he was 18 months old. He put that memory into Look Homeward, Angel. Also in Angel, he describes “the old cream-colored bed, painted gaily at head and foot with round medals of clustering fruit” in the boarding house based on the one his family ran in Asheville (where he hadn’t been in many years). I saw that bed. Sure enough, "round medals of clustering fruit" are painted gaily on it.
A flawed memory is not a fatal flaw. William Maxwell writes in his autobiographical short story “Billie Dyer”: “For things that are not known—at least not anymore—and that there is now no way of finding out about, one has to fall back on imagination. This is not the same thing as the truth, but neither is it necessarily a falsehood.” Even when attempting a faithful rendering of the past, we fall prey to imprecision. You can tell the truth about all you remember, but all you remember may not be the truth. In his preface to Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, Yeats writes: “I have changed nothing to my knowledge, and yet it must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge.” Filling a memory gap with invented truth may produce something more interesting—and appropriate to the story—than the actual experience.
Here is an example of a tiny non-truth-non-falsehood. For a brief time, one of my neighbors was the novelist Davis Grubb (Night of the Hunter, Fools Parade). Years later, I wrote about the time I came across Davis in the hallway and asked him how his new novel was going. He replied, with exasperation: “I don’t know, I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” adding that he thought there might be a part in the movie for Jane Fonda. I also, in the piece, mentioned he had a small dog named Howdy Rowdy whom he took by taxi to West Virginia, a nice little detail. Still more years later, I came across a photograph of Davis Grubb and his dog, taken around the time we lived in the same building. The dog’s name: Rowdy Charlie. And, Harry Greenberg is pretty sure that he told me about Jane Fonda.
Even if you do have a firm grasp on the truth of your memories, don’t tell too much of it. Witnesses at a trial promise to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” but in literature the whole truth is less than a selection of its parts. As Aristotle says, “History tells everything that happened within a period; drama is selective.” Be careful not to overload the reader with too much drama-obscuring history. In Take the Money and Run, a witness is asked to recount the events that led to Woody Allen’s character being apprehended. He starts to give a history of his day and gets hung up on what kind of juice he had that morning. Of course, Allen plays this for humor, but I have read some history-laden pieces that weren’t so funny.
One of my teachers, David Ignatow, once asked a student, "What do you want—the truth or a good poem?" He might have added, "That's what writers do, they take the truth and twist it a little."
A side note: Writers almost always must declare prose to be fiction or nonfiction, with all the respective freedom and responsibility. We don’t do that with poetry. Magazines don’t have sections for “fiction poetry” or “nonfiction poetry”; publishers don’t label collections one way or the other; and writing programs don’t offer two kinds of poetry workshops. Poets are free to vary their approach to the truth from line to line, poem to poem.
adapted from The Writing Workshop Note Book
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