Mslexia

From the Mslexia Workshops Collection

Short Story Competition Workshop 2 - Family Stories

Devised by SARAH SALWAY

Old family stories are a great source of material, not least because we often hear only half the story, so our imagination is already working to supply the rest.
Edinburgh writer Jo Swingler has never forgotten being told by her mother about four Australian monks who turned up out of the blue in an ambulance to visit her grandmother in the 1960s. Swingler's mother had no idea who the monks were, so working with just this fragment, Swingler wrote 'Not even an ambulance can save you'.

Four monks in an ambulance is the kind of arresting picture that would be hard to conjure from nothing

Four monks in an ambulance is the kind of arresting picture that would be hard to conjure from nothing. The good news is that nearly every family contains similar stories. Over the years, when I've asked people, I've been told fantastic stories – the one about the man who built two identical houses on the same hill but facing out in different directions, because his wife couldn't decide which view she liked best; or the superstitious great aunt who wrecked the marriage she was trying to save because she was too busy making spells; or the gossip who got into strangers' cars at traffic lights in order to have a conversation with them.

The prize-winning stories of Jhumpa Lahiri all have a strong theme running through them. Her characters struggle vividly with loss and exile in both her collections (Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth), and express so many complicated and believable emotions, that it's not surprising to discover that at least one of her stories – 'The third and final continent' – came from a story her father used to tell about his 103-year-old landlady, who loved to talk about the men who had been to the moon.

when I use my own family's stories I am often terrified how they will react..

Although these details found their way into Lahiri’s story, she makes it emphatically hers. ‘I think the difference is that I am at such a remove... I have no idea what it's like to immigrate, I have no idea what it's like to be a man… even though all of these details were given to me in terms of family history, I had to work extra hard to make them ring true’ (Twelve Short Stories and Their Making, Persea Books, 2005). The work paid off: when Lahiri showed her father the story, he simply said: 'My whole life is there’.

Although we often hear that every writer has a 'splinter of ice in their heart', when I use my own family's stories I am often terrified how they will react. Yet by publishing them in my name, I can't help feeling that I am claiming ownership of them in a way that's different from all us sitting around, taking it in turns to tell the same stories time and time again. My need to explore this material is so strong that I know I will be telling the stories my own way – not the way my siblings might.

Writing to understand my life, and that of others, has always been a primary aim – and privilege – of my writing practice. And it has certainly got easier, although there are still family arguments over many of the details I use. A character in my novel Something Beginning With has to wear a coat made from leftover hunting pink material. This led to many discussions with my siblings about whether the garment was actually a coat or a jacket. In the end I had to say, 'It's my story'.

When we take something from life, our attempts to be faithful to the facts often get in the way of the story we need to write.

Every time I worry too much about what other people will think, my writing becomes stilted and self-justifying. The only way round this is to write the first draft as if no one will read it. It's only in the editing process, when I have worked out what I need to say, that I decide what details to include.

But you can't always spot what will annoy people. In one of my early short stories, based on my father's memories of the first new car he ever owned, I had my character leave the car out in the drive to show it off – something my father swore he never did. Similarly, Swingler hadn’t expected her mother to get upset about the grandmother in her ambulance story serving Spam sandwiches to the monks. 'I'd used this as a way of placing the story in a specific time,' said Swingler, 'but this detail really jarred with her. She said my nan would never have used Spam – ever!'

But Swingler kept the Spam sandwiches in her story, just as I left the car in the drive, and Lahiri changed the chronology of her father's story so that the day her character arrived in Britain was the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

When we take something from life, our attempts to be faithful to the facts often get in the way of the story we need to write. By crying 'But it really happened!' we forget that emotional truths can be more important than facts. By connecting the moon landing to her father's first experiences in Britain, Lahiri shows just what a huge step it is to move to a new country: ‘It was so much a part of my family lore that it's one of those things you feel so close to, you can't see it. It was only after I had spent quite a bit of time wrestling with the making of the story that it occurred to me that it was such a fascinating confluence of events –one very personal and one so very, very public, that changed the world and how human beings think of themselves in relation to the rest of the universe.’

EXERCISE: Mixing personal and public

- If you can't think of a family story, interview family members about their childhood until something jumps out at you. Then research what was going on in the wider world at the time: What were the big news stories? What music was being played? What people wearing, reading, eating, talking about? Try to make connections between the family story and the bigger world picture (change the date or location if necessary). Looking at your family's personal story in the context of the larger public story will help you see it in a different way.

- Try starting with: 'It was the year that ... (public event); it was also the year that .... (private family event)’ For example: ‘It was the year that a bomb went off in Harrods; it was also the year that my mother first met Mr Richards.’ Keep swapping over between public and private and see where it takes you. This is your first draft. Keep telling yourself that no one will see it…

SARAH SALWAY is the author of three novels, and a collection of short stories, Leading the Dance (Speechbubble Books). The current Canterbury Laureate, her first poetry collection, You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book, was published by Pindrop Press in March 2012 (www.pindroppress.com)

Download a pdf of this workshop

WORKSHOP ONE: STORIES ABOUT STRANGERS
WORKSHOP THREE: NEWSPAPER STORIES

These workshops have been edited from Sarah Salway's original essay in Short Circuit: a guide to the art of the short story edited by Vanessa Gebbie (Salt, 2009) especially for the 2012 Mslexia Women's Short Story Competition, judged by Tessa Hadley. Find out more.