Taking Yourself Out of Your Fiction

Some of the best writing is inspired by personal experiences but putting too much of yourself in your writing can hurt your cause.

Writing serves many purposes. It is one of the highest forms of communication. It is also a recognized means of self-therapy. An honest, first-person account of an extraordinary event makes for some of the best, most gripping and memorable reading. On the flip side, personal narratives can be the recipe for whipping up mundane and trite sludge, which at its very worst is pure self-indulgence.

It is often put forth that writers must be brave. They must put themselves out there emotionally in order to write. Even to write fiction means digging deep and exposing our inner most thoughts to the public. We need to be ruthless and take the story where it needs to go, putting fears, worries, inhibitions and biases on standby.

If one is writing based on aspects of personal reality this advice is even more apt. Those tapping their own lives for inspiration are encouraged to give up the most private and difficult details of any specific scenario if it benefits the story. It is often the most raw and demanding details to put into words that readers enjoy most.

So how do great writers strike the balance of injecting enough self to suitably excite the reader without destroying a work with too much? It comes down to the parts of self that we are inserting and why. Some are core to the genius of a work. Others should never see the light of day. To leave any of these tell-tale signs of the activity of self behind in a final draft is like a surgeon who sews up a bandage inside the patient’s belly. It serves no one.

There are many ways unwanted parts of us get stuck in our writing. Here are the five main culprits:

Remove your notes

The first natural aspect of self to have a legitimate place in all written work is an honest part of the process of writing. It is just a mechanical issue. As we write we move from trying to understand our subject to expressing it for others. Along the way it is understood we will sometimes write in short-hand. We deposit mental notes to ourselves before we write the sentences intended for readers. We get started by building scaffolding. It only serves us and must eventually be removed. It is by definition, temporary. Left in place, even vestiges, makes a manuscript look unfinished at best and like a building that’s been restored but remains ensconced at worst — you only get hints at the beauty underneath.

Your vacation photos are for you

We all know the stereotype of the overenthusiastic photo-snap boring friends and family to death with the 1000-slide vacation presentation. What is exciting to you, because you were there and it is your life experience, may be the perfect sleeping elixir to someone else.

Writers risk a similar fate if they overestimate the interest of others in their personal experiences. Is your story ideal truly gripping because it offers insight into a core aspect of the human condition or it is just of raging interest to you because of your particular circumstances, beliefs or interests when it happened?

This is a hard question to ask as it might rule out many potential ideas as lacking. If an idea passes our own filter, it rests with others to look and see if it passes the vacation photo test. Rare vacation photos are truly exceptional. We love saying to our vacationers ‘that one is so good it could be a postcard!’ and really mean it. That is the reaction you want from your readers. The good news is that there is often an abstraction of any one story that might be too personal that does appeal to a broader audience. Apply the same ‘is it too me?’ mental filter to each chapter, section, paragraph, sentence and word as you move towards the finish line. Shards of left-over self, necessary for preparation and cooking, are critical to remove before eating, as they drastically dilute overall flavour.

Judge the story not the truth

If you are writing fiction based on experience you must know when to stick with the truth and when to let loose the creative juices and pump up the fiction. Sometimes truth overshadows the potential for a better story in the translation of reality-inspired events to fiction. If the true order of events occurred over a few months, but would be ten times more extraordinary and compelling for the reader if they occurred in a single day, make the retrofit. Do it with gusto and glee. Stretch.

We need to draw inspiration from real life where it helps and drop it when it hinders. Test and retest the logic of the story. See where you can raise the stakes. See where you can accelerate the pace. Dreams never occur in real time. They are snapshots of action over longer periods. Good books are too. Take the time and make the effort to make your story fiction.

Seeing the forest for all the trees

Even if 100% fiction, writers are often so close to their work they fail to see the forest for the trees. In this case, self is restricting the scope and breath of the work. This is where working within a writers group, getting feedback from willing readers or turning to a professional editor will pay off.

Sometimes such narrowness is a critical and legitimate phase. All authors have to start somewhere. In an early draft a writer might be so busy building the description of one side of an intersection they forget the other side(s). This is just part of getting to the finish line. The sin is leaving such gaps for the reader to fall into. Such oversights are also evidence of too much self. The author needed to be more attentive to looking at the story the way readers would. Readers aren’t mind readers. They only get told what is on the page.

Acknowledge the dual roles of self in writing

It is often the role of an editor to remove the unwanted vestiges of self from a manuscript. The best authors, though, take on this challenge with zeal and do not spare their own feelings in completely removing the unwanted parts of self from their public writing. Seasoned writers will know where self lurks in and it will be completely purged by the final draft.

Whether it is looking for crutches an author knows she uses or removing trite words, like ‘now’ and ‘then’ or beefing up weak verbs, a good author will take the time to finish the translation of concept into reality. This is the act of great writing. She will also know when lazy, nostalgic, or historic self played a card and remove any text that is just there to bulk up the word count, because it was written on the train to Prague, or she feels it is surely the most lyrical but obviously superfluous passage she ever written. She will remove it with a smile knowing this is the process of good writing and file it away in the desk drawer where all great starts end up.

Such a polished feel is a key part of the reader’s perception of a book being professional and high quality. There are no more fingerprints on the mirror showing the artist was there working, just a clear reflection of the world the writer is trying to create.

The paradox is that writing comes from self and yet sometimes self has to be purged from the final product for readers to find it fulfilling and finished.