Call Me Charlie

Issue 283

You guys,

Halfway through my conversation with

Wayne Scott

I noticed he kept referring to the main character in his memoir—himself—in the third person.

I asked if that was a tool.

“Absolutely,” Wayne said. “Some of my most miserable experiences in writers’ critique groups have been when people were writing memoir, and as you’re having the conversation in the group they’re saying, ‘I did this, I did that.’ They’re talking about the story and continuing it in the first-person narrative, and then it really just becomes group therapy because people want to rush and comfort the ‘I’ that’s sitting in front of them.”

I thought of my own book, and how the Charlie in the story often feels like a version of me from a different life even though it was only eight years ago. If I were to read my story aloud to a group I don’t think people would rush to comfort me but I do fear they might judge me. Referring to her as Charlie could allow some separation from the cringe and shame that often comes up in my stories. (I wonder how Sam is going react when I start referring to myself in the third person every time I talk about my book.)

Wayne’s book, The Maps They Gave Us, is about marriage and betrayal and reconciliation, but to me it was mostly an example of how to write about shame. Wayne cheated on his wife, the mother of their three children, with men. After two years of shopping his book around, trying to get it picked up, he and his agent kept getting the same message: really compelling story, really good writing, and no one’s going to read it.

“The average reader,” Wayne explained, “who is a middle class woman, is not going to read a story about betrayal. She’s gonna see what it’s about and she’s gonna be like, fuck him.”

After that, Wayne reached out to independent presses who were much more willing to take a risk on his raw and vulnerable story. I asked his advice on how to move through the publishing process for my own book.

“Write an honest book that’s beautiful,” he said. “And don’t think about the market. Then see where you can make it go. The closer you get to the publishing industry, the more it kills your creativity because you start thinking more competitively about how your work will fare.”

Wayne and I also discussed when to take creative liberties and change inconsequential details, how to build suspense in scenes, how writing in first-person present tense kept him more vulnerable because it created guard rails around the narrative and did not allow him the foresight or knowledge of the writer at the desk, and how he thinks about writing memoir and its impact on our kids.

“I told all my kids, you don’t have to read it,” Wayne said. “I wasn’t thinking about anybody in my family when I was writing. I was thinking about readers who don’t know us. By the time something is being put into an art form like a memoir, it’s not an intimate communication that we’re having within our family anymore. These are not things I’m needing to tell you. This is a story that I’m wanting to communicate for a larger purpose in the world. I wanted people to think about marriage differently. And you don’t have to read that story.”

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Until next week,

Charlie