This was by far my favourite tweet of the week, and it made me reflect again on the importance of character in memoir, and how so much hinges on it! Mary Karr writes a whole chapter on the importance of voice in The Art of Memoir, with its genius title, ‘A Voice Conjures the Human Who Utters It’ – and its opening line: ‘Each memoir lives or dies based 100 per cent on voice. It’s the delivery system for the author’s experience – the big bandwidth cable that carries in lustrous clarity every pixel of someone’s inner and outer experiences.’ So voice is character – as memoirs it’s all that we have. And if voice is character, then we need to pay attention to ourselves as living, breathing beings made out of ink and paper. Isn’t that a contradiction? – As always with memoir. Because it’s you – it’s me – but it’s also not.

The narrator – and protagonist – even if it’s the first-person pronoun, is not me. It is a person I have created in order to tell my story. She is my persona. But we still need to work on developing her character, because the reader only knows what the writer narrates, and if we want to keep the reader’s attention our main protagonist (me) must be the person that she or he identifies with, is compelled by and is champion of. This is as difficult as it sounds!

We are taught, time and again, that in order to write a convincing first-person fictional character, he or she must be a strongly realised voice, and, at best, stunning and unusual, in order for the reader to want to be intimate with them for the novel’s duration. It’s no different in nonfiction. But, in real life, we are all pretty ordinary, there is nothing that unusual about us; what if in our ordinariness there is plenty that is interesting, and plenty that, if we go deep enough, is entirely relatable? It’s authenticity that we’re trying to find, in both fiction and nonfiction, and conveying a particular truth that will appeal beyond the naval-gazing teenage bedroom.

But perhaps this is not helpful. Perhaps I’m tapping into a fear that all of us have that our lives are not interesting enough to put on the page. Why does anyone care? Or is this, when we really think about it, in fact a false thought, one that is there in order to keep us from doing the thing that we really want to do? Because it is also unworldly, as it lacks the simple understanding that we are not actually unique in this feeling. That this is something we share with many other fellow human beings. That by tapping into this feeling, we are tapping into universal truth. It’s also not seeing its beauty, and that we can use this feeling to our advantage – by simply admitting to it and our other uncertainties in the text. That this simple admission of our human fragility is what brings the personal narrative alive.

It helps us if we re-educate ourselves to acknowledge that those simple moments in our day, our loves and friendships, family dynamics, histories, our interactions with the natural world, are actually what create interesting narratives if we go deep enough and engage with the complexity of these small wonders, and their unresolved questions. Life remains a mystery and it is the job of the memoirist, or the personal essayist to ask the kinds of questions that we all ask all the time, but perhaps are not yet sensitive enough to recognise. Phillip Lopate suggests (in his chapter, ‘the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character’ in To Show and To Tell) that writing about the self is perhaps a potential release from narcissism. ‘It means you have achieved sufficient distance to begin to see yourself in the round: a necessary precondition to transcending the ego – or at least writing personal essays that can touch other people.’ So, now you have your defence to those who accuse you of being solipsistic for writing memoir. We memoirists are actually the antithesis of this because we learn to see ourselves as part of a greater whole.

When creating character in nonfiction we begin, as does the fiction writer, with the classic five pack of character development:

• What do they look like?
• What do they say?
• What do they do?
• What do they say about themselves?
• What do others say about them?

And what if, like in fiction, character is an agent who struggles for his or her own desires, reminding us that characters, in order to take full presence on the page, must act, not just be acted upon?. The word ‘struggles’ is important here. Our desires are often not easy, and our desires are often thwarted. Sometimes our desires are those things we are convinced we need, despite them being the things that cause us most harm.

So how do we turn ourselves into a character? We must be able to stand back, see our faults and be ready to interrogate them (and share them!). We must try to separate the ego from the self, and therefore any identifying feelings. We must attempt to turn ourselves into a character. Carl H Klaus writes in his slim but fascinating book A Self Made of Words that it helps to think of character as ‘a performance of sorts… Most of us perform a variety of roles every day of our lives, given the different people we encounter – at one moment with friends, at another with a boss, at another with colleagues, and another with loved ones. With each of them we tend to talk and behave in a different way, presenting a different versions of ourselves, a different persona.’ You are many selves – a woman, a daughter, a sister, a mother, a professional, at heart a child.

Part of this blog post is taken from my teaching material for the memoir course I teach, perfect for beginners and intermediate memoirists, running in February, 2022, link here: https://www.londonlitlab.co.uk/course/creative-nonfiction-compelling-memoir/