How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

I think a lot of people I know would enjoy How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. It’s not a writer’s instruction guide, but rather a collection of essays, some of which are about the writing life, some about the author’s struggle with childhood abuse trauma, some about being a gay man in America.

The following are quotes from How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. I hope they encourage you to read the book. Meanwhile, try a few as writing prompts.

Quotes to Use as Writing Prompts

That night, as I lay awake trying to sleep, I heard the knock of ripe mangoes falling from the trees that circled the house and ran up and down the street. The noise ranged, depending on the ripeness, from the plop of a tennis ball to a pulpy sort of splash to the occasional smash when one of them would crash through a car windshield.

We need to cut that tree down, my host mother said the next morning. She would say it whenever this happened, but they never did. It was as if they accepted a broken windshield as a price of the mangoes, which we ate as fast as we could. They had their gardener collect the fruit instead, and replaced the windshield as if they were changing a tablecloth. And that would be among the first of my object lessons in the ways of the very rich.

Years later, and only when I learned of the deep poverty in Chiapas—the reason they had those walls topped with barbwire—did I think to question whether it was really just mangoes breaking their windshields–if mango season lasted as long as a summer.

The boy was the latest iteration of a series of heroes like this for me—Encyclopedia Brown, Sherlock Holmes, Batman—who went from being ordinary people to heroes through their ability to perceive things others missed. I wanted to see if I too could obtain these powers through observation.

His mother chose that moment to come outside, and her diamond ring, the biggest I’ve ever seen, flashed as she covered her mouth and screamed with joy. It was a sort of ring you could use to signal for help if you were ever lost on a desert island.

(Said of Annie Dillard) Getting pages back from her was like getting to the dance floor and seeing your favorite black shirt under the nightclubs black light, all the hair and dust that was always there but invisible to you, now visible.

I learned that the first three pages of a draft are usually where are you clear your throat, that most times, the place your draft begins is around page four.

Now cut out only the best sentences, she said, and tape them on a blank page. And when you have that, write in around them, she said. Fill in what’s missing and make it reach for the best of what you’ve written thus far.

Annie Dillard . . . had warned us that writing about the past was like submerging yourself in a diving bell: you took yourself down to the bottom of your own sea. You could get the bends. You had to take care not to let the past self take over, the child with the child’s injuries, the child’s perceptions.

Go up to the place in the bookstore where your books will go, she said. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there, and then go every time.

The scent of a rose where none should be is now formally one of the signs of Mary’s presence.

That afternoon, I tried to understand if I had made a choice about what to write. But instead it seemed to me if anyone had made a choice, the novel had, choosing me like I was a door and walking through me out into the world.

I told my students all the time: writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit—an exercise in finding out what you really care about.

The plot I like the best worked through melodrama, the story’s heart worn on the sleeve before being bloodied up: rings of power, swords, curses, spells, monsters and ghosts, coincidence and Fate. These were safe to the person I had been, as all of them were imaginary and impossible problems with imaginary and impossible solutions. They consoled, but they were not choices, emotions, and consequences based on choices, people exchanging information they needed to live their lives. Finding a magic ring of power that would allow me to face an enemy who had won all our fights before was not the same as mastering myself for the same fight.

A single grand action unifies a story more than a single person, the characters memorable for the parts they play inside it.

For this reason poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history: poetry utters universal truth, history particular statements.

When I read in the lore that red hair was considered a possible sign of fox ancestry, I recalled a single red hair my father used to pull out of his head and the nine stories he made up for me at bedtime about foxes, and went looking for a more ancient fox ancestor.

All of my attempts at therapy previous to this had been about the issues that moved above certain ruptures in myself that remained undescribed. The difference was that I had never raged that the therapist had not figured this out about me. If anything, I was proud of it. I had endured, I told myself. I was so strong. But this is not strength. It is only endurance. A kind of emotional or therapeutic anorexia. I was not strong. Or if I was, it was the adrenaline of the wounded. I was really only broken, moving through the landscape as if I were not, and taking all my pride and believing I was passing as whole.

It felt as if a president had been assassinated, but the president was alive. Instead, the country we thought we would be living in was dead. As if a president had assassinated a country.

Of the seven deadly sins, despair is the sin of hopelessness, believing there is no salvation. This sin can even be considered a heresy, as, to quote The Catholic Encyclopedia on the topic, it “implies an assent to proposition which is against faith, e.g. that God has no mind to supply us with what is needful for salvation.” It is a sin because it is the belief that grace—God—will not provide.

Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine.

Other Writers/Other Prompts

Here are a few other posts about authors that include quotes that can be used as writing prompts.

Rebecca Solnit

Kazuo Ishiguro

Miriam Towes