Structuring Autobiographical Stories
 

Diane Howard, Ph.D.   
Copyright © 2006    

Department of Communication and Dramatic Arts
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor

Monograph for Ethnic Studies Conference
(Joint National Conference-
National Association of African American Studies,
National Association of Hispanic and Latino Studies,
National Association of Native American Studies,
International Association of Asian Studies)
Feb.  2006

      Definition of Autobiographical Stories
 

Autobiographical stories can be one’s own stories or that of others. Ideally, they should include the original words of the characters. Primary, personal communications may have been obtained from oral interviews or may have been written by the ones depicted, in letters, journals, diaries, or written autobiographies. Autobiographical stories can be told in many forms. They can be historical, spiritual, philosophical, poetical, narrative, descriptive, and/or explanatory in nature.
 

      Value of Autobiographical Stories 
 

Autobiographical stories can be uniquely beneficial, educational, and therapeutic. Encouraging understanding, compassion, and empathy, they frequently challenge stereotypical images and hasty judgments that are based on simplistic perceptions of others. Through their role modeling effect, autobiographical stories can influence achievement motivation in audiences. They can facilitate valuable insight, close study of history, and research from first-hand sources.                            

Autobiographical stories can easily be performed long-distance over videoconference equipment, which can facilitate open communication in what seems like an atmosphere of anonymity. They can also be simply presented to on-site audiences in homes, schools, theatres, museums, and churches. They can be presented to audiences involved in educational, performing arts, cultural, historical, and civic organizations.  Autobiographical stories are not only useful in the field of education, but also in related fields such as missions or in studies of history, literature, psychology, sociology, and cultures. They can provide insight into cultural dynamics, such as that of gender, race, and ethnicity.
 

      Distinguished from Biographies  
 

Autobiographical stories are distinguished from biographies, which emphasize the recounting of objective, external events and experiences. The focus of autobiographical stories is on subjective questions, struggles, and representations.   Autobiographical accounts are not necessarily linear, chronological, or one-dimensional. They can be presentations of associated montage or diverse collage images about multiple facets of human personality and identity.

Autobiographical stories of oneself or others are driven, created, and built out of understanding and empathy with the characters. Storytellers can create scenes with emotional impact after they have listened to and understood the characters in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. Autobiographical storytellers should incorporate words and communication styles of the historic characters, which give the stories uniqueness, color, authority.
 

   Incorporating Action, Conflict, and Desire  
 

Effective autobiographical stories begin with critical experiences or turning points for the main characters. These crises commonly involve counteraction of the characters’ desires. Conflicts with the desires, intentions, or motivations of the characters can come from within, from others, or from the characters’ environments. Opening, critical scenes usually prepare the audiences for what is to come. What is to come is typically foreshadowed. The focus is always on the characters. The stories reveal the characters’ struggles. They describe action.  The storytellers are careful with dialogue. They   must know where the problems or tensions are for the characters. The storytellers develop scenes, which visually show the struggles of the characters. These scenes are ones of crisis and of significant action.
 

      Developing Structure 
 

Some autobiographical stories have plot, character development, and continuity. Some are more fragmented montages or collages. Some integrate multi-media effects, sounds, and images. Despite possible variations in form, effective autobiographical stories are structured works of art, which include a beginning, foreshadowing, discovery, incidents, crisis, and denouement. Scenes have rising action, climax, and falling action. Each entire story also has rising action, climax, and falling action.  The beginnings of the stories are particularly important for captivating and sustaining the attentions of the audiences. Oftentimes using humor accomplishes this purpose. Then the telling of the stories must proceed with a rhythm, energy, and intensity that keeps the audiences involved.

Engaging autobiographical stories usually include incidents, epiphanies, and/or experiences in relationships that promote self-discoveries and understandings of self-identity. Being character-driven, the stories enable the characters to speak and to reveal their subtexts through action. The motives, objectives, desires, or wants of the characters are at the center of the stories. The storytellers know what is at stake for the characters. And the stakes must be high. The audiences are more likely to be engaged when the stakes are high.            

The storytellers reveal the strivings of the characters with nature, themselves, and with others. The points of view of the characters involved in these conflicts are revealed through non-verbal and verbal communications. The storytellers consider the characters’ points of view and their internal dilemmas, desires, and motivations.
 

    Choosing Form 
 

Autobiographical stories can take many forms. They need not be exclusively written as factual, historic, prose, or non-fictional accounts of characters’ lives. They can include virtually any written or verbal form, non-fiction or fiction, prose or poetry. Self-biographies, self-definitions, self-representations, self-revelations and so forth can be produced in many forms. For example, T.S. Eliot's poetry or Tennessee Williams' plays are autobiographical stories.

Autobiographical storytellers can move forward, backward, or back and forth in time. Their stories can move from reality to fantasy or back and forth. They can move from subjective to objective realities. The stories can juxtapose more than one account or perspective. It is important, however, that storytellers clarify the movement of the stories in time and space, the known from the speculative, the subjective from the objective, and fact from fiction.

If verifiable information about characters has been difficult to obtain or if the characters are particularly elusive or complex, questions about them can be incorporated into the script. More than one person’s questions or perspectives of the characters can be included in stories that are montages or collages. The perspectives of these different voices can contain both information and questions. However, voices should incorporate the original words of the speakers whenever possible and the different voices should be distinguishable, clear, and clarified. Using the original words of speakers whenever possible provides depth of understanding, complexity, intensity, and unique style. It facilitates empathy and enables sharing in the worlds of others.      
 

      Historical Elements of Structure, Form, and Style
 

The study of classic aesthetic elements of structure, form, and style in the history of autobiography is instructive in developing autobiographical stories. Many classic autobiographies include dramatic tensions between competing external factions or internal conflicts. They often begin with narratives about childhood or youth, which are interrupted with crises, conversions, or turning points in the personalities. These critical periods are frequently revisited in retrospective narration. Turning points can involve shifts and developments in self-understanding, personal identity, maturity, philosophy, and meaningful relationships.      

Out of careful selection, memorable incidents are presented as scenes. These memorable scenes often involve obstacles, pivotal episodes, or epiphanies. The epiphany or spot of time can be told in slow motion to reinforce the significant insights being revealed. Memorable scenes or moments can be revealed and/or reinforced literally, metaphorically, or symbolically. Truth and sincerity, however, are important values in most enduring autobiographies.            

In general, classic autobiographies have included subjective histories of the characters’ souls, psychological intensity, and emphasis or concentration on significant moments. In contemporary notable autobiographies, an impression of a continuous present is common, although the self of the autobiography is often dynamic, experiential, and changing. Contemporary noted autobiographies have presented multiple selves by way of unified montage or diverse collage. Some include distancing in various kinds of codes or through fictional autobiographies, such as in autobiographical novels. Sometimes dreams, fantasies, or myths have been juxtaposed with reality in contemporary acclaimed autobiographies or there has been movement in these works between past and present. Clarity of subjective and objective, fantasy and fact, and time and space are important to inhibit misrepresentation. 
  
Autobiographical stories can present characters’ true selves through metaphor in prose and poetry. They can juxtapose stories in different times and places. The work of T. S. Eliot exemplifies this. 

 And heard another’s voice cry: What! are you here?”

           Although were not. I was still the same,

           Knowing myself yet being someone other…

           And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed

           To compel the recognition they preceded…

           In concord at this intersection of time

           Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,

           We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.

           (Eliot 1943; in Olney 1972:304)
           
Eliot speaks in these lines. He converges the Eliot of the present, the Eliot of the past, and the Eliot of the future, as he speaks in another’s voice and is surprised by his own voice. Past events can be reinterpreted in the autobiographical storytellers’ present awareness. Past events can be related to present consciousness by way of significance. (Again, however, efforts to guide correct interpretation are important.) Specific elements of a personal history can also become universal, timeless, and poetic. Shakespeare’s autobiographical stories have specific characters that are also universal types.

Autobiographical stories can involve self-definition, self-creation, and self-invention. They can incorporate re-enactments of dramatic scenes that involve formations of identities. There can be layers of individual and universal selves presented through analogy, metaphor, symbolism, or fiction.

In recent years, distinguished autobiographies have included significant sociological interests. Individual identity has been particularly representative of collective gender or ethnic identities. In such autobiographies, self as a cultural construct dominates over the individual self-identity. In discourse related to these phenomena, terms such as other and difference are common. A contemporary phenomenon of transmutation has emerged in autobiographical writing. Elements of one’s self-identity have been projected on to the many, with which others can identify. A transfer has taken place from personal to universal.

Contemporary concepts of memory in autobiography include generic memory, flashbulb memory, and engram. Generic memory involves the blending of personal memories into a generic image of common experiences. Flashbulb memory involves specific, intense, immediate memories of the circumstances in which one first encountered a consequential event. Epiphanies seem related to this kind of memory. An engram is an auditory memory.

In contemporary autobiographies, close relationships, especially with family members, are often objectified and magnified into archetypal or universal relationships. Mothers and fathers are commonly seen as national archetypes. Scenes are frequently laden with symbols to the point that a universal situation is created. Literal locales are often transposed to metaphoric places. Visual and auditory impressionism is often employed, rather than literal reproduction. Chronological time is often interjected with subjective time. The past can be brought immediately to the present by a narration. Tunneling and telescoping breaks down time barriers. Although transmutations of time are employed, chronological time can serve as a reference to tie moments of subjective time together.

        Conclusion 

Although autobiographical stories can be told in a multiplicity of ways, it is important to remember that the autobiographical stories are basically about characters revealed through carefully researched and selected action, dialogue, and narration. Autobiographical storytellers need to study, understand, and adopt their characters’ original words. The characters should be allowed to speak their own words in authentic and appropriate settings. Words, which are authentic, sensual, descriptive, and which have auditory appeal should be carefully selected and employed.

In conclusion, effective autobiographical stories commonly incorporate the following scenic outline:

•  An engaging opening scene usually involves a crisis, turning point, or critical moment.
   

• Subsequent scenes build in intensity while revealing the unique history and struggles of the character.

• A critical problem or conflict within the character, with others, or with his/her environment rises in increasing tense action to a climax.
   

• The climax in the conflict is followed by action, which resolves the major problem positively or negatively.
   

•  A strong ending with definitive action leaves a lasting imprint on the audience.