A specific type of storytelling that I have been working
with a lot lately is life writing. Life writing is both a genre (that can be
roughly described as telling the story of a life or an experience) and the
academic field that studies this genre.
When I taught life writing to students of journalism last
year, I formulated several rules for high quality and responsible life writing. Of these, the following five are the essential rules of good life writing.
1. Life writing is about actions, not suffering
You can’t have a story without a main character and a main
character is not someone to whom things merely happen. A main character wants
something and acts to achieve this goal. For instance, we can’t write a story
about someone who merely suffers from a disease – we can, however, write a
story about how someone deals with his or her disease.
2. Life writing needs a plot
So, we need a main character, and this main character has an
aim. Life writing tells us how this main character achieved or did not achieve
his or her aim. And the plot of the story explains how this happened.
3. A good life writing plot makes four things clear
So, you’ve got a main character and your main character has
a plot. This plot is not complete, unless it makes four things clear: (1) why
did the main character want to achieve his or her aim? (2) how has he or she
gathered the means to achieve this aim? (3) in which way is the aim achieved –
or not? and (4) what are the consequences of this all?
I always stress the importance of (1): if it isn’t clear
what your main character’s motives are, your readers/viewers/listeners won’t
care for him or her. And if they don’t care for the main character, they won’t
care for your story!
4. Life writing is about experience
Life writing isn’t about truth finding. It isn’t about who
is right and who is wrong. It's not really about facts: it is about
experience. In life writing, experiences are turned into stories. In its best
form, life writing tells us of the experiences of those people whose
experiences often remain untold. There's a Nigerian proverb that says: “Until the
lion learns to speak, the tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter”. Life
writing offers a voice for those who cannot speak, those who are refused the
chance to speak by society - the marginalised, the poor, the unknown strangers.
5. Life writing is not sensationalist
Life writing treats with care the stories of those who are
all too easily branded as crazies, the ill, criminals or liars in our society. In
life writing, people are not made the object of a spectacle. Rather, their own
point of view is offered through telling the stories of their experiences. The
life writer, whether writing about his or her own life or that of others, attempts
to do so responsibly and ethically.
Dr Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar