Making it Real: Mary Karr's 'carnal world'

We talk about writing being (or failing to be!) ‘vivid’, ‘believable’ and ‘alive’ for the reader - and it’s a huge part of our job as writers to make it so.

Readers want to feel the people and world of our story as real, even when it’s fiction and they know no one can know what 7th century London was like, or that the memoirist couldn’t possibly remember such details accurately.

And yet compared to theatre, film or graphic novels, prose fiction and memoir have only black marks on paper or screen to transmit what the writer has imagined or remembered, for the reader’s imagination to recreate it.

So how do we make sure the reader’s imagination will be able to do that work, and recreate the world in a way that feels ‘real’ to them, and is true to our original creation?

One of the best books I know to explore this is Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir: it’s a compulsory read for memoirists, I’d suggest, but I’d hugely recommend it to fiction writers too. After all, the definition of creative non-fiction, including memoir, is ‘non-fiction written using the tools of fiction’, so Karr’s book is a brilliant toolkit for both.

Plus, it’s funny: one reason this post is going up late is that I kept being drawn in to reading more! This post starts with how humans perceive the real world, and what that means for writers, before digging into Karr’s concept of ‘carnality’, how it works in figurative language, when you might not want to be carnal, and finishing with a checklist of things to think about in working with this understanding.