The Art of Mortification

In our never-ending quest for authenticity, writers make a lot of the same mistakes — avoiding the words “I don’t know,” for example. Or writing every story like you’re a WWII radio journalist, reporting from the European front.

Just as common, but more counter-intuitive, is the belief some writers have that over-sharing, or amping up the salaciousness factor of their stories, makes them truer.

Gotham teacher Rax King sees and hears that a lot, she said at our recent Creative Nonfiction Writers Conference. And it’s a mistake.

“I think there are people who read my work, or other work that feels very confessional, and their takeaway is, ‘If I want to do this well, I have to expose all my secrets,’ ” Rax said. “No! I’m an incredibly secretive person. I formulated nine new secrets since I just started talking just now. For a lot of us memoirists and personal essayists, our work reads as very honest, and it is. But it is a curated honesty.”

You don’t have to buy authenticity by sharing your darkest secrets, or by loading your novel’s characters down with shady pasts and painful secrets. Authenticity comes from things like being honest about what you are comfortable sharing or being willing to admit when you’re wrong or don’t know something. It comes when you don’t swerve when facing up to hard truths.

“My usual measure for whether an embarrassing detail stays is: Does this make me feel squirrelly and uncomfortable, but not mortified?” Rax said. “If I read this and I’m like, this is mortifying, that has to go. I’m not going to mortify myself for an audience.”

I noticed a similar philosophy at work recently in the novel Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey. In Rax’s recent essay collection Sloppy, she writes about drinking too much, saying the wrong thing, and shoplifting. Maggie, the protagonist of Heisey’s novel, reeling from a divorce, drinks too much, says the wrong thing, and attempts a disastrous threesome with two people she barely knows in a port-a-john.

The novel climaxes in a scene that would be painful to live through, but is not so over-the-top it strains credulity, or mortifies the reader.

“I’ve been forced in my career to lightly tap at the borders of my comfort zone,” Rax said. “But I’m not going to just go barreling past it because it feels the fastest way to a book deal. First, that’s not true, and also, it would be damaging to me in a way that I would not be able to live with.”

Upping a story’s mortification quotient is often just another way of swerving just before you’re finally about to confront something hard. When you’re thinking of confessing something really painful, or putting your protagonist through another disastrous three-some in a public bathroom, tap the brakes and ask yourself: Does the reader need to be more scandalized here? Or do they need to know something more meaningful, and more true?

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty, Gotham Writers