The Anecdote Behind That Story
As a fiction writer, I try to pay attention to the world around me. I achieve this with varying degrees of success – I find it all too easy to get carried away with my own thoughts – but the goal is fairly simple: what can I use? Quirky characters, funny, out-of-context quotes, amusing or odd moments, distinctive speech patterns and many other such things all wait to be preserved for future use in a story.
Well, after they’ve been stripped down, torn apart and rebuilt in new forms, of course. The strange driver of the shuttle van that once ferried my wife and me to the airport won’t find new life in a taxicab, but he could make a great doorman, bartender, ticket scalper, petty thug or any of a variety of other roles, depending on the needs of the story.
Now, if I wanted to write about that uncomfortable drive in a nonfiction context, he would have to stay a shuttle van driver. That makes sense to me.
What gives me a little more trouble is that if I wrote about that trip to the airport, however interesting it might be to read, it wouldn’t be enough. I would have to make some point with it, perhaps about driving or airports or travel or some such thing. It would have to connect with the reader beyond the bounds of the event itself.
In fiction, you can just tell a story. In nonfiction, you have to say something in the process.
This is a little weird to me. Every story has a point to it, something to come away thinking about. It shows in the way the story is told, the way the characters interact; the whole of the piece is assembled just that way because the author wanted it just that way. The writer is saying something in the process, or perhaps implying something is more accurate, because what the reader gets out of it isn’t always what the writer intends. The story lies somewhere in between, coded through the writer’s filters, but decoded through the reader’s. Transmission errors are inevitable.
But in nonfiction, the writer, it seems, is expected to clarify the coding process so the reader has less to decode. On a purely philosophical level, that pleases me because I enjoy speculating about the nature of reality and belief. As a writer, though, it feels a bit like spoonfeeding, an unfair exaggeration to make a point.
I’m thinking about this right now because I’ve recently turned in a true story to my nonfiction workshop that I have been told is an anecdote. The professor and my classmates are helping me understand what needs to be done to make it an essay. Apparently it is difficult to publish an anecdote. They are very good writers, and I’m quite sure they’re right.
But I bet I could change a few details and sell it as a short story.
