Stop Protecting Your Protagonist!
AKA Yourself, if you're writing memoir
Hi Everyone,
This is the next installment of my accidental series on Introspection and Confiding v. Confessing in memoir and fiction. In case you’d like to read the posts in order, here are the earlier ones:
Today’s is the post that I originally intended to be a solo, before I realized it needed a LOT more set-up to make sense. Here’s the background:
As some of you know, I’ve attended the Sirenland Writer’s Conference a couple of times and both times worked with fiction writer and professor extraordinaire Jim Shepard. Well, last year Jim’s workshop consisted of an intriguing mix of memoirists, fiction writers, and one biographer. And for each and every one of us, the message of the workshop was to STOP PROTECTING OUR PROTAGONISTS.
Read on to find out how this same message might apply to you.
Why we let our protagonists off the hook
It’s natural. Our instinct as writers is to cover for the narrators, beloved subjects, and past selves who appear as the main characters in our work. We’re so close to them, we can’t see them clearly. We may not want to reveal their weak or unseemly sides. So we avoid scrutinizing the many ways they’re complicit in the trauma, grievances, sorrows, and failures that darken their stories. The real problem, though, is that we writers tend to grant this pass without even realizing we’re doing it!
Examples? Here’s a round-robin from one writing workshop:
A fiction writer narrates her story from the POV of a character who feels lost and helpless, but ignores the question of that character’s agency — which would give the work more direction and meaning.
A memoirist writing about her career in a male-dominated profession stacks the narrative deck against her sexist colleagues but lets herself off the hook when it comes to her own accountability.
A biographer writing about a major pop star who overdosed is so consumed with sympathy and admiration for her subject that she fails to honestly reckon with the many ways the star sabotaged her own life.
In that same workshop I realized that I’ve been writing for years about the frustrating wall of silence that my father built around himself, but in all that writing I failed to confront the many ways that I helped him build and maintain that wall. Like all the other members of the group, I could not see that I, as protagonist, was complicit in the problem at the heart of my story.
We write with blinders on. It’s an occupational hazard especially for memoir writers but also for any writer who closely identifies with their protagonist. Even when we’re determined to confront the deepest, ugliest, most painful truths, our vision is distorted, our processing unreliable. Our natural inclination is to pin the blame, responsibility, and agency on others rather than admit our own complicity.
Those blinders do serve a purpose. We deceive ourselves to protect ourselves from discomfort and confusion. This fact of the human condition is one reason why unreliable narrators can make fascinating characters in fiction. But only if the author is on to them and exploits their unreliability. If the author’s not aware that they’re unreliable, then the fiction has a serious problem.
In real life, it might not be possible or even advisable to rip the blinders off. Sometimes we shield ourselves from truths that we’re simply not ready to process. But if we want our readers to believe and trust us, we must find ways to acknowledge our protagonists’ blinders, write past them, and at least get closer to the truths we so instinctively deny. If we’re writing memoir, we’ve got to get around our own blinders.
This challenge is possibly the hardest part of writing but also key to meaningful writing. Here are a few suggestions to help you peek around your own blinders.
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