Who is Juan
Miguel? Who is he based on? People often ask me about the main character of my
fiction series and they are often disappointed when I have to tell them that
Juan Miguel is me. As writers, we just cannot escape ourselves. All of the
characters, the motives, the feelings, the thoughts, and the language belong to
the author.
What many of us
as writers don’t realize at first but start to realize later is that everything
you write is about you. You can write about the weather. It’s about you. You
can write about your mother. It’s about you. You can write a novel. It’s about
you. You can write about mashed potatoes. It’s about you.
I give the same
advice to aspiring writers, young and old alike, including myself. Tell a good
story. You’ll be in there somewhere—probably everywhere.
Goodbye to a River is one of the best
stories I’ve ever read. Somehow Texas writer John Graves makes it compelling
that he took a canoe trip down the Brazos River in the 1950s, a short time
before the river was to be dammed and much of the scenery and wildlife
obliterated in the process. It’s a great read and contained within the big
story are many wonderful small stories, past and present. His observations and
knowledge are priceless.
In this Texas
classic that has won numerous literary awards, Mr. Graves managed to avoid the
many pitfalls of writing about himself, and he did it quite artfully.
You can usually
tell rookie writers because they want to write about themselves in memoir
style, as if they were a character in a novel. “I did this, I did that, I saw
this, I said that, and then he did this to me and she said that to me and blah
blah blah, nobody cares.”
The trick is to
reveal yourself to yourself and everyone else while talking about something
else. Then it’s interesting. Then somebody cares.
That doesn’t mean
there aren’t some great memoirs out there. Running
With Scissors, Augusten Burroughs’ indictment of his liberal upbringing and
the dysfunctional family who adopted him, is one. Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt’s anecdotal retelling of his
childhood in Brooklyn and Ireland, is another. My all-time favorite memoir is All Over But the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg.
It’s a book about growing up southern and I can relate to that. Mr. Bragg, you
tell one hell of a story.
What do the great
memoirists have in common? They have great life stories to tell. Not all of us
do. Were my struggles at Sam Houston Junior High School as interesting as Rick
Bragg’s struggles growing up poor, fatherless, and practically homeless? No,
frankly they weren’t. And very few of us can write like Rick Bragg or John
Graves. Lucky bastards.
My published novels, The Legend of Juan Miguel and The Passion of Juan Miguel are available on Amazon.com.
