What It Means to Make Your Story Relatable

Today’s post is by author and educator Deborah Williams.

If you’re a serious writer, chances are good that you have a battered copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird on your shelf (or, if you’re like me, maybe you’ve committed large chunks of it to memory). But when my first-year college writing students read Bird by Bird, they’re almost always coming to the book for the first time.

Because I’ve taught approximately eighty-gazillion first-year writing courses over the course of my teaching career, I can pretty much predict how the students will respond. Many of them (particularly the international students) will be bashful about the chapter called “shitty first drafts,” because they’re anxious about saying “shitty” in front of a teacher. Many of them will feel deep kinship to the chapter on “Perfectionism” because they got into college (for the most part) by being good at school—and that requires a certain level of Type-A behavior.

“It’s like I feel so seen,” someone will say, to which their classmates will nod in vigorous agreement. 

“I can just totally relate,” someone else will say.

That’s when I pounce: “You can relate? You feel connected? How many of you are sixty-something, born-again Christian, recovering-addict, single-mother, dreadlock-wearing white ladies from Northern California?”

They laugh. They’re pretty emphatically not any of those things. They’re eighteen and nineteen, from any number of countries and across the United States, and they probably won’t take another writing class after this one (which is a required course). Almost none of them want to “be writers”; in fact, most of them are headed towards majors in STEM or business.

These “relating” moments demonstrate to my students (and to me, again and again) that connection gets established in the nitty-gritty, in the small nuggets of lived experience. Sure, we all feel love, anger, joy, anxiety—but we recognize ourselves in the particulars. When Lamott describes her anti-writing voices, for example, she characterizes one of those inner critics as a stoned William Burroughs, who tells her that she’s “as bold and articulate as a houseplant.” The description makes me and my students laugh in recognition: “I thought I was the only one who felt that way,” one of my students said. Lamott’s specificity comforts us—we are not alone—even if, like my students, you have never heard of William Burroughs.

I ask my students to show me their “I can relate” moments and then we focus on how that sentence or that section works. Those moments don’t happen by magic, I say; those moments get made. They’re a product of craft. (Okay, and a tiny bit of magic.)

Here’s what we discover, again and again, when we talk about Bird by Bird.

Pour the concrete

Lamott uses concrete, tangible nouns; Bird by Bird is a master class in “show, don’t tell.” Readers watch as she procrastinates by peering at herself in the mirror to see if she needs orthodontia; we share her pain when she talks about recovering from a tonsillectomy. Even the title of her book comes from a concrete moment: her brother, then in middle school, freaks out about a report on birds that was (of course) due the next day. Her father’s advice to him? Take it bird by bird. She builds on her brother’s freak-out with her own experiences, using the example of writing restaurant reviews for a now-defunct magazine: “I’d write a couple of dreadful sentences, xx them out, try again … and then feel despair and worry settle on my chest like an X-ray apron.”

Panic as a lead apron: who doesn’t recognize that feeling?

Action!

As the students point out relatable moments, we look at Lamott’s verbs. Yes, she uses some forms of “to be,” but more often than not, she uses one-word action verbs. Action verbs are like Spanx for your prose: they tighten, streamline, hold it all together; they provide visual cues that preclude the need for adverbs. Stephen King, famously (adverbially) insists that the road to hell is paved with adverbs. Allison K Williams, in Seven Drafts, suggests using adverbs only if the adverb provides some quality of surprise: yelling quietly, or smiling angrily, for example.  The distractions that bedevil Lamott before she sits down to write turn her into “a dog with a chew toy, worrying it…chasing it, licking it … flinging it back over my shoulder.” Now, I’m not a dog owner, but I can see all this happening—and I connect it to my own urge to do all the laundry when I’m on a deadline.

You talkin’ to me?

Throughout her book, Lamott refers to “we” and to “us” almost as often as she uses “I.” The people she’s talking to are writers and students of writing; she’s not talking to her church community, or to members of AA, or to the PTA. Who is your “we” to whom you’re trying to relate and how can you make that clear? Are you talking to other parents? Survivors of a trauma? Writers? Teenagers? As much as we writers might hope and wish and imagine that our words are for everyone … probably they’re not. Thinking about your “we” is going to help you think about how to craft concrete moments that will bring your “we” into your prose.

And who are you?

In thinking about the “we,” it can be tricky to determine how much to divulge as the narrative’s “I.” My students often say that a key “relatable” element comes from Lamott’s willingness to make herself vulnerable—showing us how she wrangles to stay focused. “I never feel like she’s scolding me,” one student said. And yet, even as she’s making herself vulnerable, Lamott makes clear that she’s writing from years of experience. She knows enough about herself as a writer to trust her own process and as a result, she gives us permission to find and then trust our own processes.

What level of disclosure feels right to you? Can you push that boundary just a tiny bit further, to the very edge of what seems possible? It’s at that tipping point, often, that we find those moments of connection that make reading so powerful. Even if you’re writing fiction, knowing your own vulnerabilities can make your characters and your scenes that much more resonant.

In writing memoir, that level of vulnerability and disclosure gets trickier, because your story probably involves other people who might not want to be revealed. Lamott, again, has an answer, which is that if people wanted you to write nicely about them, they should have been nicer to you. It’s a flippant response—but is she wrong?

Relatable doesn’t mean likeable

There are always a few students in class who find Lamott’s humor aggravating; they say that she makes them feel stupid. They admit that some of what she says resonates, but they don’t like her.

Their response raises a question: do we need our characters to be “likeable”? (I’m going to sidestep the entire issue of whether anyone ever asks this question of male characters, or male writers, for that matter.) Think about characters you’ve encountered who resonated with you. Was it because they were paragons who always made the right choices? We might think that what we want when we read are role models, but reading about role models often makes me feel like I’m reading a lecture or a sermon; to use my student’s word, I feel scolded. Connections emerge in the struggle, in moments of transition, as a character tries to chart a new path. That’s where we find recognition, connection, and exploration.

In the novel I’m working on, the central character is a fictionalized version of a (long-dead) writer whose work I’ve admired for years. It’s hard not to make her do everything right, because I don’t want my literary hero to make mistakes. But the story exists, I remind myself, in her stumbles. That’s where I have to locate my action.

Zoom in

Think about a trip you took where you ended up with a bunch of snapshots of bridges, buildings, trees, and landscapes in your photo roll. Those are pretty pictures, sure, but after a while, they all blur together. Was that the beach in Maine or the beach in Maryland; was that pretty tree in San Francisco or Japan? Put a few people in the photo and suddenly it’s a story, one that we can write for ourselves even if we don’t know the people involved: those kids are too close to the edge of the waterfall! I would look better in that dress! We hiked that same trail!

That’s not to say that your writing (or your IG posts) shouldn’t have moments of reflection and stillness, which I’ve started calling “zoom out” moments for my students, who have grown up amid the endless digital/visual stream. Too many of those, though, and we’re looking at your story from a drone’s sky-level view, like a David Attenborough nature documentary that never hones in on the snow leopard and her kits.

Where to zoom out? That depends, in some ways, on how you choose to define your “we.” Your audience will need different types of zooming out, different levels of generalization and abstraction. Lamott talks to us as if we’re all in her writing class; we’ve been invited into that room, as it were, and so her levels of abstraction are all designed with the aim of helping novice writers become more confident. When we trust our own process—when we recognize that we have a process—the little procrastinatory moves, the shitty first drafts, the vexed question of how to make our perfectionist selves be quiet, all become easier to handle. Her abstractions, and then her specific and vulnerable scenes of her own struggles, help us to recognize ourselves so that we can get our words—ourselves—onto the page.

Deborah Williams

Deborah L Williams has been a college professor for almost thirty years (she finds this astonishing). She has published essays in Brevity Blog, The Rumpus, The New York Times, The Common, and The Markaz Review, among others. Her academic book The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction, came out in April from Oxford; she is currently working on a non-fiction book about the global liberal arts and the dynamics of hope, and on a novel called “Edith on Fire,” about the novelist Edith Wharton. You can find Deborah on Blue Sky, or on her website, Mannahattamamma.net.