Back to Basics: Write a believable story by including the stink, slime, and grime

 

Readers want stories that catch their attention and reach into their hearts. They want stories that will stick—stories that will make a difference in their lives. 

 

To that end, in recent weeks we’ve worked on creating well-rounded main characters your readers can relate to. (Click on How to create “a sensory world that you and your readers can inhabit together” as well as Refuse to let cardboard characters lurk in your memoir.)

 

We’ve also worked on crafting the best descriptions of your memoir’s key places so readers feel they’re with you at that place.  (See The importance of “place,” and How’s your progress in describing your memoir’s key places?)

 

In addition, you’ll want to write a believable story.

And for that, you must include 

the stink, the slime, and the grime.

 

In Walker in the City (1951), Alfred Kazin has returned to his childhood home in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn. He writes about everyday sights and experiences. He creates vivid images and includes sensory details:

 

“The greasy, spattered front steps, just off the Chinese hand laundry in the basement, led into what must have been the vestibule of a traditionally stately Brooklyn Heights mansion. Despite the metal shields holding up the battered front door, you could see that it once had been a beautiful door….

 

“…I step off the train at Rockaway Avenue, smell the leak out of the men’s room, then the pickles from the stand below the subway steps…. An instant rage comes over me, mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness.

 

“It is always the old women in their shapeless flowered housedresses and ritual wigs I see first; they give Brownsville back to me. In their soft dumpy bodies and the unbudging way they occupy the tenement stoops, their hands blankly folded in each other as if they had been sitting on those stoops from the beginning of time, I sense again the old foreboding that all my life would be like this.” (From Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, William Zinsser)

 

Perhaps your story is set in a country’s slums. Remember from our recent posts: Show, don’t tell.

 

Instead of telling people that children clawed through acres of garbage searching for something to eat—show readers. Describe the raw sewage flowing between row after row of rusty, crumbling, patched-together dwellings. Include sensory details:  smells, sounds, feels, tastes, and sights.

 

Show, don’t tell the extreme poverty of the slum-dwellers and their lack of good nutrition. Show the people too poor to get medical help for their diseases. Show the high mortality rate among children under age five. Show the dense population, filth, and environmental hazards. Include the high unemployment rate and the lack of educational opportunities. Show that almost no slum-dwellers have electricity or running water. Show the kidnappings and rapes.

 

“Some budding memoirists rush through a scene

without stopping to smell the rain on the pavement.

Granted, you don't want

to overwhelm your readers with details;

you have to keep the story moving along.

If the scene or event is crucial,

slow down and describe it so that the reader

can experience it with you.”

Sharon DeBartolo Carmack

 

Use specific words, compelling words. Gritty words.

Study old photos to discern specific details you might have forgotten. Did you write letters or emails about your experience? Did you keep a diary?  If so, they’re great resources for you.

 

Avoid sugar-coating.

Recreate your experience so readers will feel

they’re beside you, encountering what you did.

 

“ . . . feel the rush and throb of real life.”

O. Henry

 

Remember this good advice from Rhys Alexander:

 

“Detail makes the difference between 

boring and terrific writing. 

It’s the difference between a pencil sketch 

and a lush oil painting. 

As a writer, words are your paint. 

Use all the colors.” 

(“Writing Gooder”)