Exercise #17: Shapeshifting the Autobiographical
Alix E. Harrow, Salman Rushie, Antonya Nelson, Jane Smiley
Hi friends,
Hello again! I hope you’re doing well as we move into summer, and that you’ve had the chance, if you’re vaccinated and ready, to begin seeing more of your friends and family in recent weeks. I hadn’t expected to travel yet, but an unexpected trip back home to visit my parents in Michigan meant a surprise two weeks with my folks and most of my siblings after 18 months away. This past year-plus was the longest I’d gone without seeing them, and I was so happy to be with them again: it felt simultaneously wild and mundane, in the best way. If you’ve been away from your family, I hope you’ll get a similar chance as soon as you can.
As of today, I’m six weeks away from the release of my new novel Appleseed, which was recently listed by The New York Times Book Review as one of the “books everyone will be talking about” this summer; its first pre-pub reviews also started appearing, including at Publishers Weekly, where the reviewer wrote, “Bell delivers a stirring take on climate change, complicity, and human connection… This is an excellent addition to the climate apocalypse subgenre, and the way it grapples with humanity’s dramatic influence on the planet feels fresh and bracing.” I’m so glad the novel’s pub date is finally almost here, and I truly appreciate all of you’ve already preordered it! You can order the book from wherever you shop, but if you’d like to reserve a signed copy, my local indie Changing Hands should ship to anywhere, and I’d be glad to personalize your copy for you if you order from them.
Good luck with this month’s exercise! Be safe, be kind to each other, and have fun!
Yours,
Matt
What I’m Reading:
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. I love a good portal fantasy, and Harrow’s novel is one of the best I’ve read, the rare book I’m sure I would have liked exactly as much at 12 as I did this year, at 40. I’ll be thinking about this novel for a long time, not least because it’s so beautifully written:
Worlds were never meant to be prisons, locked and suffocating and safe. Worlds were supposed to be great rambling houses with all the windows thrown open and the wind and summer rain rushing through them, with magic passages in their closets and secret treasure chests in their attics.
“Ask Yourself Which Books You Truly Love” by Salman Rushdie. This long essay is a great read about Eastern literature and about the migration of stories around the globe, as well as about the transformative, transfixing power of story, especially during childhood. Rushdie writes, “This is the beauty of the wonder tale and its descendant, fiction: that one can simultaneously know that the story is a work of imagination, which is to say untrue, and believe it to contain profound truth. The boundary between the magical and the real, at such moments, ceases to exist.”
Exercise #17: Shapeshifting the Autobiographical
As I said above, I spent a couple weeks this month visiting my parents in rural Michigan, which also meant plenty of time in and around my hometown. I went by the elementary school where I learned to read, visited the library where I checked out so many formative books, ran my miles on the cross country route and the high school track, went by my first apartment, saw my friends’ parents’ house, and so on. The room I stay in at my parents isn’t my childhood bedroom—that was long ago converted to other use—and in fact wasn’t even part of the house when I lived there: they added on to their place a couple years after I graduated from high school. But the room does have a bit of my old stuff in it—most notably my beloved 1988 World Book encyclopedias—as well as copies of all of my published books. Flipping through the house copy of my second novel Scrapper—my only book so far explicitly set in Michigan—I discovered one of my parents had highlighted or underlined every reference they found to our own lives or my hometown, like so:
Scrapper isn’t an autobiographical novel—it’s a kind of detective story set in in a defamiliarized version of Detroit, a city I’ve spent a lot of time in but never lived in—but I did borrow my protagonist Kelly some of my own past, including my hometown of Hemlock, a car I’d driven as a teenager, my years of high school wrestling and my abandoned religion, among other things. No one else but my family could read the novel and identify all the things my parents had: the autobiographical had seeded Kelly’s backstory, helping him come to life in my mind, but in the end it made up only a small part of him. The more important thing, to me, was the rest of the character who had grown from that small but necessary donation of the real, and how that material was transformed by the process of fiction writing.
This month’s exercise is designed to help you do something similar, taking a single short anecdote through a series of transformations to arrive at a story generated from the autobiographical but ultimately likely quite different. It’s based on an exercise I’ve taught in week-long classes, using a technique inspired by a workshop of Antonya Nelson’s described in her essay “Short Story: A Process of Revision,” published in The Writer’s Notebook II from Tin House; it’s an attempt to create imaginative space between the autobiographical and the fictional, a way of growing the kind of useful distance people talk about when they say that they had to leave home to write about it.
In this exercise, we’re going to leave “home” too, not by moving our bodies cross-country but by changing the rules we use to work with autobiographical material between consecutive (but increasingly different) drafts of a single story.
Step One: To begin, write a 500- to 750-word first-person version of a personal anecdote, something alone the lines of what Nelson describes in her essay as “an autobiographical event, some nugget of narrative that you intuitively understand has meaning.” Something may come to mind immediately, but I’ll note that this exercise may work best if the anecdote is something that you haven’t told and retold over and over: choose a memory that’s not quite so polished as your favorite story you tell whenever you get a chance. Keep this first version you write as close to reality as you can: don’t embellish, don’t evade, don’t invent. Just get it down in your own words, as you might in a diary.
Step Two: Now rewrite the story in the third person, from the point of view someone else who was present for the event, inventing whatever is necessary to plausibly inhabit their viewpoint. This may be a person close to you—a sibling, a parent, a partner, a friend—or someone you don’t know at all: a waiter, a flight attendant, or a park ranger. Regardless of how well you know the real life inspiration for this character, you’re going to have to invent a lot more about them than you did while writing as yourself. As you do so, the story will likely start to veer away from the version you would tell, because this outside character will inevitably see things differently, focusing on different details and bringing their own interests and worries to bear on the situation. (Tip: for maximum effect, pick the person who you think would see it most differently.)
Step Three: Take the third-person story from Step Two and rewrite it in a different time period. We’ve moved away from the seed anecdote in point of view, now we’ll move away from it in time: if you’re writing about childhood—which for me began in the 1980s—you might transpose the story into either the present, bringing it forward three decades and dealing with (among other things) the technological advances that have occurred since, or push it backward into the past, shedding technology and picking up the ideas and culture of a previous age. If I’m writing about something that happened during a family trip to Yellowstone in 1995, how would it change if I set the same events in 1885, shortly after Yellowstone became a national park? In the same way that you picked a new narrator in Step Two who allowed for the biggest difference, try to choose a new time period which will require the great reimagining: I would aim for at least a decade’s difference
Step Four: Rewrite the time-traveled story from Step Three again, this time using a different form. Up until now, each version of the story has probably been a fairly straightforward narrative, because that’s what the anecdotal beginning called for. This time, try something more radical: write the story as a series of nested fragments, or as an oral history, or tell it backward or braided, or as a stream-of-consciousness internal monologue, or as radio broadcast, or or or or. What possible forms does the material of the story suggest? Are there already objects inside the story that might be reinvented as the surface of the story? If no other possibilities seem doable, try the epistolary: rewriting your story in journal entries or letters or text messages will inevitably and necessarily transform its telling. You might also turn to Jane Smiley’s essay “The Circle of the Novel” for inspiration, choosing something from her list of the twelve kinds of discourse fiction might contain: travel, history, biography, the tale, the joke, gossip, diaries and letters, confessions, polemics, essays, the epic, and romance.
Step Five: Take the POV-shifted, time-traveled, form-warped story from Step Four and retell it in a different genre. (Recreate the new form if you want, or return to something more conventional looking, bringing along any useful possibilities the form-shifting suggested.) What happens to this version of your story if you retell it as a noir? How is it different than what happens when it becomes a fairy tale, and how is that different than if you use techniques drawn from magical realism? Can your anecdote function as science fiction or fabulism—and if it can’t, what interesting things happen because of its ill-fit for the genre you’re trying to shoehorn it into? Because we’re writing a fairly short story, you’re probably going to want to focus on one of your chosen’s genre’s notable elements or obligatory scenes: for instance, if I was transforming my story into a heist, I might try to move into material into the obligatory scene in every heist narrative where the master thieves detail the heist, explaining their plan in detail, picturing everything going right, even though the reader knows it definitely won’t…
Step Six (and Beyond): At this point, you might be very far from where you began. A slim childhood anecdote about yourself might by now be a story narrated by an invented version of a stranger who appeared at the periphery of your perception, set a thousand years in the past, having somewhere along the away also become a fairy tale about sentient animals written in the form of a naturalist’s log—or it might be literally anything else. You could keep going with applying more deformations and transformations forever, but my guess is that if you’ve played along this far, then one of the five story versions above is probably pretty good by now: when I’ve done a version of this exercise with students, it’s almost always number four or number five, for whatever reason. But if Step Three is the best version, go back to that one and polish it up. Finding the best outcome of this exercise is a less linear process than it looks like, with the exercise really meant more as a way to explore the story-generating possibilities of the autobiographical than to have any particular endpoint. If you’re unsatisfied with the result, repeat the above steps or continue to invent new transformations for yourself, especially those might give you entry into genres or forms that you’ve always wanted to write in but haven’t found your way into yet. There’ll be interesting discoveries along the way, I promise.
One last suggestion: if the original 500- to 750-word limit feels too restricting, trying adding 500 words at each stage, so that what begins as a 500-word anecdote ends between 2500-3000 words after Step Five. My guess is that you might need that breathing room as you progress.
Good luck! See you next month!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.