The Soul of Story: Authenticity

My first car was a 1980 Toyota Tercel hatchback, payment for which I had earned working 60 hours a week at two jobs all summer. It was a gutless four-speed manual with a top speed of eighty km/hour. But it had a gleaming new paint job—white, with blue striping along the sides—and I was sold.

The engine coughed and died after three-and-a-half years. By then the rust had eaten through the wheel wells and the head gasket was leaking. In the end, the snazzy paint could not compensate for the jalopy underneath it. It had no breath, no life, no soul.

In the same way, our stories often fail because, despite the compelling gloss of our concept, or the clever sheen of our plotting, the engines of our stories are weak; the framework is rusted. They are shells without a soul.

What, then, should be under the hood of our stories? What will help them to drive well, and last? Despite the variety of styles and structures, all stories of lasting merit incorporate the following three central principles: authenticity of place, authenticity of character, and authenticity of voice.

Authenticity of Place

When I read Delia Owen’s Where the Crawdads Sing, I quickly realized that I was not reading a murder mystery per se, but a love letter to the swamps and marshes of North Carolina. The murder mystery is the sparkle, the reason for us to sit up and take notice. But the soul, the engine of that story, is its place.

Modern societies have become more transient. People move from neighbourhoods, from cities, from countries, looking for greater opportunities, greater safety. But with that movement we lose a connection to place. Much of our current environmental crisis comes from the abuse of the land by those without connection to that land.

But the writer must know and love the land, must bathe in its fields, drink its skies, swim in its sounds, rest in the rhythm of its pulse.

It is hard for me to do that in the city. I am usually too busy working to pay attention to my surroundings. 

But my wife and I have a cottage in Point Roberts, Washington, that we love. We visited last weekend, in fact, the first warm weekend we’ve had all season. We walk the same trails, sit at the same beaches as we have for the last 20-plus years; despite its small size, fewer than five square miles, still we discover new things, and new ways of seeing familiar things. This weekend I discovered an abandoned nest in our hazelnut tree.

I watched eagles fish along the tidal flats of the bay.

I saw a spider I’ve never seen before--misumena vatia, a flower crab spider--catch a bumblebee.

I stood for a long time with the largest bullhead I’d ever seen as it gasped its last aquatic breaths. (I thought it was merely stuck on the sandy shallow, but when I used a plank to move it into deeper water, it continued to sit; it was large, and old, and had settled into its place to die.)

And I marvelled at the colour of the wildflowers growing among the grasses.

All around me were the violence and beauty of life; I only needed to slow down enough to notice.

When that reverence of place is the background for a story, it will breathe.

Authenticity of Character

A story with a living, breathing setting will still fall flat if the people inhabiting it are not unique individuals.

In honesty, I have always struggled with character development. From my earliest attempts at writing, my characters were often wooden, sanitized versions of myself—not really me, but a hollow version of me without the flaws that I am mostly blind to. Having a family has cured me of that to a degree; I have people in my life who love me and are not afraid to laugh at my eccentricities or call me out on my hypocrisies.

One of my favourite authors, Robertson Davies, understood character as well as any writer who has ever put pen to paper. I suspect a large reason for his genius in this area was his involvement with theatre. To act well is to know the subtleties of one’s character, not only in language but in gesture and attitude. How many times have I heard of confident actors responding to a line of dialogue, telling the director, “I don’t think my character would react this way.” They embody that character, and in embodying the character they understand, they empathize.

When we are too committed to a preconceived plot, we may not leave room for the character to flip the tables on us; we have our sense of the way a story should go, but the characters will have theirs.

If we know our characters intimately, if we can empathize with them honestly rather than manipulate them according to our plot’s needs, we can perhaps move closer to story that readers will care about.

Authenticity of Voice

Voice, one publisher told me, is impossible to teach. It can only be discovered, he said. And despite the protestations of well-meaning English teachers I have known, I think he was right.

One cannot teach you how to speak like you.

But one can perhaps guide you into speaking like yourself.

An authentic, writer’s voice, as I understand it, is like character in that it contains the range of words, syntaxes, and attitudes of the unique individual author. And that voice becomes a lens through which other voices—those of the fictional characters—are refracted and projected to the reader.

But voice takes time. Babies are cute, but they babble nonsense. Toddlers find simple words because their goal is to identify—to identify needs and wants, to demonstrate understanding. (My lead-footed mother was always appreciative of my identifications, especially while driving: “Look mommy, a police car!”) But the writer must be concerned with the subtlety of language; clumsy words betray clumsy thoughts. Truth, fictional or not, is always nuanced.

Ultimately, voice is confidence: confidence in language, confidence in thought. Do I know what I want to say? Do I know the most effective way to say it? These, if only I can discover them, are my voice.

And when I do, I know the engine of that story will drive a long, long way.