At the time, I believe Bellamy was most well-known for his fiction, but Literary Luxuries is a great nonfiction book that I think any writer—regardless of genre—would do well to check out.  It is equal parts memoir, personal essay, craft guide, and survey of the literary landscape of the late twentieth century.

One of the chapters in the book—a craft essay titled “The Autobiographical Trap”—should be of particular interest to nonfiction writers.  The essay’s target audience is fiction writers, but I think the lessons he imparts are important for nonfiction writers to hear as well.

“When one writes from life and memory,” Bellamy writes, “there is always a tendency to become so involved emotionally with the material that the work becomes ‘too thin’ or anorexic.  The least suggestion (the slimmest outline or reminder) of the traumatic events you wish to write about causes the floodgates of emotion to open up for you … So it is not difficult at all to persuade yourself that the floodgates will open up for the reader as well.”  There’s danger in making such an assumption, though—our readers don’t have our experiences, haven’t perceived the world as we have, and those suggestions, outlines, and reminders that resonate so much with us need to be developed and described in more detail if they are to resonate with the reader.  As Bellamy explains, “This means a careful and full rendering of the action, the motivations, and the expository details that are so familiar to the writer that they are easy to overlook.”

This, I think, is often the most difficult lesson to teach nonfiction students.  The piece concerned with a particularly vicious fight with Mom simply doesn’t have the same impact if we don’t get the details—not only of what was said during the argument—but also what the relationship is normally like, when not in crisis-mode.  “Well, she’s my mom,” the student replies.  “I love her.”  Well, of course—but what does that mean?  I love my mom too, though I don’t lie down next to her in her bed to talk about everything that has been going on in my life, the way my wife lies down next to hers when we go to visit.  The love my mom and I share is more rooted in sarcasm and irony.  If I’m to write of the relationship in a more upsetting, less-normal state, I need to be sure to establish what the normal state is before I can expect my reader to understand the gravity of this change.

I also like Bellamy’s observation that “It is a sorry fact that life does not often work in perfect story or novel form.”    Bellamy, of course, is advising fiction students to discard the autobiographical in order to write a better story, but I think this is an important for lesson for people committed to writing about real life, too.  Students raised on fictional narratives—novels, movies, soap operas, reality television—have sometimes internalized the inverted check mark approach to writing.  There needs to be an introduction, a series of complications leading to a climax and epiphany, and then resolution.

As Bellamy points out—and as I try to emphasize to my students—life isn’t really structured like that, and in our efforts to turn life into literature, we want to avoid simplifying our experiences and thoughts so that they might fit some preconceived idea of “what a piece of creative writing should look like.”

I could probably sit here and retype the wise things Bellamy says in this book for thousands and thousands of words, but I suspect the kind folks at Bits might frown upon that—this blog is supposed to be devoted to my ideas about writing nonfiction, and not ideas I’ve plagiarized from people smarter than me.  But I guess you can tell that I really like this book, just as I’ve liked many books published by the University of Missouri Press over the years (if you’re into essays, check out Ned Stuckey-French’s The American Essay in the American Century; I’ve heard good things about E.J. Levy’s new book Amazons: A Love Story, too, and plan to read it later this summer).  I’m sad to see the press closing.  I understand that at a time when Americans are having trouble paying their mortgages and feeding their kids, an academic press seems pretty opulent, but I also think that Bellamy’s words about our culture—first published in 1995—are even more relevant today, as he notes that ours “is a time badly in need of the redeeming powers of the imagination and of great writing—all the literary sorts of luxuries that we simply can’t do without.”

I don’t want to end this blog post on a depressing or elegiac note, so I’ll ask you, gentle reader, how you deal with the autobiographical trap when writing nonfiction—if, indeed, you’ve ever been caught in this trap yourself.  Is this something you’re conscious of while drafting a piece?  Something to watch out for in the editing or revising stages?  Do you have any advice you give to your students about making their experiences and ideas as vivid on the page as they are in their minds?