Plural of Anecdote
The Fine Art of Memoir Writing
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant”
—Emily Dickinson
I would like to begin today’s offering by telling you an anecdote from my personal history about the turn of phrase, “the plural of anecdote is [or is not] data.”
I was in a meeting—once upon a time—to discuss what was being described as an “alarming trend” of errors in published material. Today, I work in STEM publishing, where you cannot use the term trend to describe data that are not in a time series unless you want your knuckles thoroughly rapped. Back then I was in the social sciences, where people sometimes bend the rules.
My team came prepared with data to demonstrate that there had been no significant increase or decrease in the rate of errors per book, per page, or per word, during the past year, three years, five years; the opposing team had come prepared with . . . anything but data. A general feeling that there were now more errors being reported than there used to be. An author who had called to report a typo in his project when none of his projects had ever had a typo before. An absolute certainty that—based on what they were seeing and hearing—the rate of errors was trending upward.
“Well that’s serious,” I said, “Since the plural of anecdote is data, after all.” I am not good at reserving my sarcastic comments for the appropriate venue. That is not a strength for me. Anyway, I expected immediate backpedaling and for someone to exclaim that, of course, no one meant that, that’s not what they were saying—instead the other team’s head honcho said, “Thank goodness someone is talking sense.”
For the record, the plural of anecdote is not data. Data are measured values, collected in a methodological way. Anecdotes are brief stories about people or incidents. A string of stories that all have the same outcome do not form a dataset. If Mary got pretty drunk and drove home safely, and then the next day Tom got blitzed and drove home safely, and then the day after that Robin got wasted and drove home safely, you do not have data that demonstrate the safety of drunk driving.
The phrase “the plural of anecdote is not data” dates to around 1982 with an earlier variant, “anecdotes do not constitute social science” appearing in Newsweek in 1967 (read about the history of the quote here). On the other hand, Raymond Wolfinger claims to have coined the phrase “the plural of anecdote is data” in 1969 or 1970 (his claim is elaborated here) but we have only his word that he said it first—his anecdotal evidence, if you will.
Shelf Life reminds you that the term data is always plural. Yes, even back when you were in school. If you absolutely won’t say “datum” or conjugate data as a plural, say “data point” or “dataset,” as those are singular nouns.
I am here to tell you today that the plural of anecdote is none of the above because, in fact, the plural of anecdote is memoir.
Memoir is an important topic for Shelf Life to cover, because of the kind of publication this is and its target audience, which is—obviously, my friends and family since that’s who actually reads it—people who want to begin writing, build or sustain a writing habit, or transition from writer to author, and who are not sure how to do those things.
As a person who does editing and publishing, people are always telling me about the thing they want to write. People want to write all kinds of different things, but I would say (anecdotally) just as many people tell me about wanting to write a memoir as a novel.
Not everyone who wants to write a memoir uses the word memoir to articulate what they want to write. Some people will say “autobiography,” some people will say “life story,” some people say “novel based on my life,” and many people don’t have a term in mind but will describe wanting to write about a particular event or struggle from their own life experience, and often for the purpose (they say) of giving comfort or assistance to other people who have had or are having a similar experience.
If the thing you want to write—the project that’s shaping up in your mind—comes from your life experience, then it’s probably either an autobiography or a memoir. I’ll go over the differences between the two forms and then offer some advice on memoir writing specifically.
Memoir and Autobiography
These terms are not interchangeable, although they are often used interchangeably. Both forms tell the events of your life story, but the way in which you tell that story, and your purpose for writing it, determine which one you will write. I think most people, once the differences are laid out in front of them, can quickly point to the one they were envisioning.
An autobiography is:
Told in chronological order
A factual account of real events
A chronicle of someone’s entire lifespan, from birth to death
Meant to educate the reader about the someone’s life
(Let’s face it) usually about a famous person
A memoir, on the other hand:
Is a literary narrative created from the memories of true events
May be told in or out of chronological order
Focuses on a specific incident or period of time in someone’s life
Entertains the reader with events that follow a plot
Will contain elements that may not be literally true and correct
If you have a burning desire to tell a specific story in writing and it is a true story that comes directly from your life, that’s going to be a memoir. If you are approaching the natural end of your lifespan and you want to leave behind a truthful account of your whole life for readers to have a record of what you did, where you went, and what you accomplished, then you want to write an autobiography.
Fiction and Fact
When you write an autobiography, you don’t have to worry overmuch about fiction techniques. The autobiographer sits down and recounts events from memory, stopping when they come to the present time. A memoir, on the other hand, needs an engaging plot. No matter how interesting and eventful your life has been, your life story probably does not follow a three-act story structure.
If you’re planning to sit down and write a memoir, you’re going to need:
A solid plot with an inciting incident
Compelling characters
Vivid settings
A theme (or multiple themes)
In other words, all the same things you’d need if you were writing a novel—but you have to find all of them in the truth of your life.
Plot
Most peoples’ lives don’t follow a tried-and-true story structure, or at least not one that is interesting for others to read. Most stories begin with a little exposition, a little background, and then—boom—an inciting incident that introduces the conflict and sends the main character off in an unexpected direction. This is the divorce in Eat, Pray, Love that sets Elizabeth Gilbert caroming around the world looking for meaning; Julia Child’s move to France for her husband’s job; or Susanna Kaysen’s admission to a psychiatric hospital.
From the inciting incident, which introduces the protagonist’s problem, there needs to be an escalation of stakes—the rising action. Whatever you did, or whatever happened in your life, that is the catalyst for the events at the center of your memoir, must lead to a series of attempts to resolve or overcome the issue. If you’re writing about, for instance, overcoming an addiction, you’re not going to have a very compelling memoir if your plot goes: “Someone I love was diagnosed with lung cancer, so I decided to quit smoking, and I acquired a smoking cessation aid the next day and never smoked again.” To tell a gripping story, mine your personal history for a situation in which you had to make several escalating attempts to overcome adversity—tried different tactics, came up with creative solutions, met some colorful allies and adversaries, and so on.
The good news is, this isn’t an autobiography so real events don’t need to go in perfect chronologic lockstep with reality. You can exercise poetic license when writing a memoir. Although you should not fabricate events, conversations, or people from whole cloth, you can rearrange parts of your narrative to tell the story more effectively (more on bending the truth in a bit).
Character
The great thing about writing a memoir is you don’t have to spend a single second developing your showstopping main character—the main character is you, the most interesting person you know. You won’t have to worry about fleshing out your backstory or figuring out your motivations. At most you may have to do some personal history research to get details right—times, places, and so on. The challenge, rather, is to make sure you portray yourself honestly, with your flaws on display, so that you come off the page as an interesting, three-dimensional human being and not a perfect, infallible paragon—those qualities have never made an interesting protagonist.
Further, you can’t be the only interesting, three-dimensional character in your memoir. At the very least, you’re going to need a thrilling antagonist (if not a few of them) and some colorful supporting characters. I’ve heard people say that the villain or antagonist of their story isn’t a person, it’s a broad concept—for instance, the juvenile justice system in the city of Baltimore, or type-1 diabetes. While something like this might provide the thematic conflict in your memoir, you still need to put some faces on it. In The Handmaid’s Tale (which is not a memoir but reads more like one all the time), Offred’s conflict was with Gilead (the society in which she lived) but that conflict was represented by memorable villains like Serena Joy—who was herself deeply conflicted and multifaceted.
In other words, get ready to feel some empathy for people you might remember very unkindly. The evil-for-evil’s-sake guy or gal never made an unforgettable villain. Pro tip: Don’t give yourself all the best lines.
Setting
Setting is almost universally crucial to memoir. By setting I don’t mean simply the physical places in which the story unfolds, but also the time period, the culture, the political climate. Think about how critical Brooklyn and Limerick are to Angela’s Ashes, or the Nazi-occupied Netherlands to The Diary of Anne Frank.
If you don’t see an immediate connection between the plot of your memoir and its setting, spend some time thinking about how they might be related. Something that helped me in putting together the plot of a memoir I’m working on was thinking about the economic climate and how it affected the industry I work in during the period of time I’m writing about, and how those effects trickled down to my own life.
Theme
An autobiography doesn’t need to have a theme but a memoir does. The theme of any literary work is the greater message of the narrative—what the story is about on the conceptual level (whereas the plot is what the story is about on the concrete level). Common themes in memoir are things like coming of age, grief and grieving, overcoming personal or systemic adversity, seeking or finding love, and self-discovery. Your theme doesn’t have to be one of those, though—and you needn’t have only one theme.
Don’t try to shoehorn your narrative to fit with a specific theme. Instead, think about the time of your life you want to write about and ask yourself what it is about that story—that part of your life, those events—that has universal applications. Not everybody spends a year in women’s prison like Piper Kerman, but everyone can probably relate to being snatched out of a comfortable environment and thrust into a new and completely alien situation with little preparation or recourse.
Bending the Truth
As I mentioned earlier, a memoirist has some leeway, some poetic license, to fudge the truth a bit in writing their manuscript. I mean, you have to. No one has a record of every conversation they’ve had with everyone, the exact words used, the exact dates when the conversations happened.
Be truthful in your retelling of events, characterization of people, and recounting of the timeline—but the gist of that truth is more important than the exact details. You’ll have to fill in some details with your imagination—what you wore, what you ate, where you went, who you saw. In keeping with the spirit of truth, make sure the details you invent are plausible both in the context of your life and of the time period. Don’t put someone in a polyester shirt in 1939 when polyester wasn’t invented till 1941 and didn’t become popular till the 1970s.
What you can do is tell the truth a bit slant—grouping events or people thematically, culling events and people that are irrelevant to the story, and capturing the spirit, if not the letter, of the conversations you had.
Order of Operations
You may find that the order of events in real life doesn’t form a neat narrative arc. With a little restructuring, you may be able to juggle real events into an order that helps the flow of the story so long as changing the order of events does not misconstrue the truth. For instance, changing the order in which Tim and Martin have a one-night stand so that it occurs before versus after Tim’s wedding to Sally probably has major implications for what the one-night stand means in the context of the story and could cause the reader to interpret Tim’s character in a way that is dishonest.
On the other hand, if you took a business trip to Minneapolis and learned ice fishing and then months later took a separate business trip to Minneapolis during which you were fired, there is no harm in consolidating those two events into one if it improves narrative flow.
Truthy Dialogue
Dialogue is the number-one place where you’re going to have to make stuff up no matter how close you hew to the truth otherwise. An influencer writing a memoir might know for sure what clothes they were wearing every day, or what food they ate, but unless you have a camera recording your every conversation, that dialogue is going to have to come out of your imagination. The trick of being truthful in dialogue is to try to honor the voice and the intent of the people you spoke with, to the best of your ability. Keep in mind that the truth is subjective—you may remember a conversation very differently than does the person to whom you spoke. It’s understood that a memoir is told through the lens of its author’s memory. You don’t have to fact-check a conversation you had in 1966.
Character Merger
Finally, consider merging multiple supporting characters with similar roles into a single character to simplify your story. For instance, if you’re depicting a period of your career during which you ran through a procession of five secretaries in rapid succession—let’s say they were Tom, Chris, Michael, Donovan, and then another Chris—and it’s not important to the plot that your secretaries kept leaving and being replaced, then just leave out that detail and make them all into one composite character and call him Earl or something.
While there’s plenty more to say on the topic of writing a memoir, generally and specifically, there’s not plenty more space or plenty more time! But if you’re just learning today that your memoir needs a solid plot, stay tuned for Thursday’s article. There are only so many plots out there—I’ll go over them all so you can find the one that fits your story the best.
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