accuracy isn't the same as worth

Accuracy Isn't the Same as Worth (Module: The Way We Tell It)

okay so. this is the one where i say something a little contrarian and some of you are going to want to argue with me. that's fine. argue with me.

here's the thing. i think you don't need it to be accurate to be worth writing.

i want to be careful how i say that, because i'm not saying facts don't matter, or that you should just make stuff up. i spend an unreasonable number of hours chasing down whether a name is spelled with an "e" or an "a" across three different records, so believe me, i care about getting it right when i can. but "when i can" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. a lot of family history isn't a document. it's a story somebody told at a table twenty years ago, and everybody who was there remembers it slightly differently, and the person who could confirm it is gone now.

that story is still worth writing down.

the version you have is the version that's real

think about the stories that actually get repeated in your family. the ones that come up every thanksgiving. i'd bet money most of them have a detail that's fuzzy, or contradicted, or that one aunt swears happened differently than everyone else remembers.

that fuzziness isn't a flaw you have to fix before you're allowed to write it down. it's part of the story. "the way we tell it is—" is a completely legitimate way to start a sentence. you're not lying. you're being honest about what you actually have, which is a family's memory of something, not a court transcript.

i'd rather have a wrong-but-loved story on the page than a correct blank page. and right now, most of you have a blank page.

how to actually do this at home

1. pick a story you've heard more than once. the one that gets told a certain way every time. doesn't matter if it's about a truck breaking down or a fight at a wedding or somebody's terrible first apartment.

1. write it the way you've heard it told, not the way you'd write a court transcript. if there's a detail two people disagree on, you can even say so in the piece. "some of us remember it happening in the rain. i'm not sure that's true, but that's how i've always pictured it." that's a sentence. that's allowed.

1. don't go fact-check it into oblivion before you write it. you can fact-check after, if you want, if there's something to check. but check second. write first. if you research first, you'll end up with the spreadsheet stuff again, and we've talked about how that kills a story before it starts.

1. flag your soft spots honestly, one phrase is usually enough. "as the story goes." "if i remember right." "grandpa always said." that little tag does the work of being honest without stalling you out.

1. read it back out loud. if it sounds like you're hedging every single sentence, defending yourself against an imaginary fact-checker, that's a sign you're overcorrecting. say the story like you'd say it at the table. one honest flag is usually enough for the whole piece.

the DI run

i'll tell you where this really landed for me. my friend aidan and i were driving back from a DI run a while back, and somewhere around the point of the mountain he started telling me about a memory of his dad's old car, something that happened on a road trip. he's told me before, more than once, "i can't write." not "i'm not good at it." "i can't."

so i just typed while he talked. we hit a red light and i got a solid chunk of it down word for word.

when i read it back to him later, he stopped and said, wait, did i say that. i said yeah, that's exactly what you said. he still tells people he can't write. but that piece is one of the better things i've collected doing this, and not one word of it is mine.

here's what i noticed, though, going back through it after. aidan wasn't citing a source. he wasn't sure if it happened the summer he was twelve or thirteen. he said "i think" twice in about four sentences. and it didn't matter even a little. the story was the point. the exact year was not.

that's the whole lesson, honestly. the year is bookend information. the memory of the car, the feeling of that specific road trip, that's the person. accuracy would be nice to have. it is not the price of admission.

before next time

find one story in your family that everybody tells a little differently, and write down your version of it, soft spots and all. don't apologize for the parts you're not sure about. just flag them and keep going.