To Tell the Truth, Part Two
Recently, I blogged about the importance of telling the truth in fiction. But what about nonfiction? If you’re telling a true story–unless you’re purposely fabricating something or trying to distort the facts–the truth takes care of itself, right?
Not necessarily.
As a magazine writer, I’ve interviewed people about all sorts of different subjects. Sometimes I’m just trying to condense the facts into the word count my editor needs–no easy task when you have a mere 800 words and the story is about why someone committed suicide or died accidentally. When I wrote true stories for Seventeen, I would generally have page after page of transcript but would have to carefully choose the parts of the story that got to the heart of what happened. I always felt a little sad that I couldn’t fully explain all the nuances that added to the story, but that’s just part of the job.
Other times, it’s not so much the facts of the story, the what happened, as it is the personal impact those instances had. That’s one reason I enjoy being a contributing editor for Guideposts, which tells “true stories of hope and inspiration” (that’s their tagline). All Guideposts stories have one goal: to show the growth and change of the narrator. What makes this so interesting and so rewarding is that often, when helping people tell their Guideposts story, you help them find the meaning in what happened…you help them see how they grew from it. Oftentimes I’ve listened to someone tell his/her story, and I’ve asked, “So would it be fair to say that because of this, you [changed/grew in x way]?” It’s nice hear the happy surprise in their voice when they respond, “Yeah. I’d never thought about it that way, but you’re absolutely right.” Sometimes you’re just telling them what they’ve told you, but in an abbreviated form that distills the facts to get to the truth. It’s pretty neat.
That’s a big part of getting at the truth–whether it’s a spiritual truth or just the facts: cutting away the parts that don’t matter. Once, I interviewed someone for a women’s magazine about a health issue, and she told me in great detail all about another health issue of hers that had nothing to do with the article I was writing. I really don’t think she could see why all of that was irrelevant. At Guideposts, they call this kind of cutting away “marble shaping”: it’s based on the legend that when Michelangelo was carving his David sculpture, he told someone as he was chipping away at his big hunk of marble that he was “getting rid of everything that wasn’t David.”
It’s a great comparison to writing, but it’s hard to do. Guideposts editor Rick Hamlin recently reminded me not to work too hard to make my stories lean and mean–because details are nice, too. “It is possible to carve away so much marble that there’s hardly any David left!” Rick said. Good advice. Striking the right balance on how much to cut and how much to leave in? That’s telling the truth. It’s not easy, but I suppose that’s just another reason that writing is an art, not a science.
