Trust Your Life Story: Finding the Point of Your Essay
Of the many cool experiences Northwestern University afforded me, one of the coolest was the opportunity to serve as assistant stage manager on a traveling children’s theater production. Before, during and after each performance, I was in charge of the dozens of props, the set pieces, and to some extent, the actors—including their 5 a.m. wake-up calls!
It was fun, challenging, and gave me the chance to learn from director Rives Collins, a sought-after School of Speech professor I wouldn’t otherwise have interacted with and learned from.
One thing he was fond of saying to the actors was “Trust. The. Text.” As they rehearsed and performed, the actors grew confident in themselves as their characters, and sometimes, whether from forgetfulness or overconfidence, they started to improve a little, straying from their lines. Rives chastised gently—but seriously. “Trust the text,” he told them. The playwright chose those words for a reason—don’t just veer from them because you can.
These days, I’ve found myself thinking of those three words when students start trying to improve their life stories just a bit.
“Well, it actually happened in a different order, but I thought it made more sense like this.”
“Well, she didn’t actually introduce me to that friend, but I thought the story would match the prompt better if it happened that way.”
“Well, no, we didn’t win that competition either, but I thought the Prompt 2 wouldn’t sound complete unless we won the second time.”
That last one was the first time I could tell a student was making up part of his piece. The ending was just too convenient. Winning a competition is not the only way to demonstrate that you have learned from a past failure. The other teams may have improved, also, and you still may not beat them. But if your team doesn’t make the same sloppy mistakes as it did the first time, if the members worked together instead of competing within the team, if they learned the lessons of your first failure—then whether or not you won, you grew.
Quite apart from the obvious ethical questions it raises, rewriting your life story is complicated and difficult. You change one detail, and soon that affects the way the story happened a few lines later, which means changing yet another thing. Or you try to “improve” the moral of the story through how the piece ends, but that means working backward and changing more things earlier in the piece so the new ending makes sense. The further you stray from the truth, the more confused the writing becomes.
There may be times in your piece that you aren’t completely confident how things went because you’re writing about something long ago. If it’s important enough to include, you can trust your memory because it’s all you have. If putting dialogue into your piece means trying to remember what was said that you (obviously) didn’t write down at the time, as long as you remember more or less what was said, that’s fine. You were there, you know what it was like. (When I told the story of “Trust the text,” I could confidently put that in quotation marks because Rives said it often. I didn’t put his explanation in quotation marks because it’s been quite a while, and I didn’t know him well. I wasn’t quite sure how he would have said it. But if I were writing about a close friend or family member, and I had a good idea of what they said, I could probably recreate the dialogue accurately enough.)
You have 650 words. If you need to leave out a subplot, or a small character who was part of a story—but not a main player—that is usually OK. Do we need to know your sister was present for that argument with your mother if she didn’t say anything? (I don’t know, we might! But if it’s not changing the point of the story, maybe we don’t.) If it removes complication for the reader without in any way changing the meaning of the scene, then you can consider it. But obviously, if a change makes you look better (such as removing from the story a friend who helped you accomplish whatever you’re writing about), that’s not just “improving clarity.” If your changes are designed to make the “meaning” of your story more clear, you’re taking it too far. If you’re changing plot details to make the story feel more the way it would feel if it had been deliberately written as a story of growth … you’ve forgotten why you’re writing.
Trust the text. Trust your life. It happened the way it happened, in the order it happened. It wasn’t designed to teach you lessons—but it did teach you lessons, and that’s what you’re responsible for telling.
Almost always, when a student has tried to make their story flow better by changing too many things, taking the story back to the full and complete truth helps us see the reason they were really writing in the first place.
Once a student attempted a scene that was completely fabricated—but totally plausible—to demonstrate her growth. When I asked for more information, the details defeated her, and she acknowledged it hadn’t happened at all. But the part that amazed her was, when we looked at what had happened—which was as unlike what she had written as you could imagine—the moral and the growth that came out of the truth was so much better. And of course it was—because that was the growth that actually happened, instead of the growth she thought was supposed to have happened.
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
