On being in charge of your story instead of your story being in charge of you

Hello! I’ve been thinking a lot about a conversation I had a few months ago with my friend, the documentary maker Adam Curtis. I’d had a worry about how to portray a particular character in my next book and I wanted Adam’s advice about it.

I’ll tell you more about my worry next week, because I want to skip straight to his advice. Which was: “Put it in there.”

What he meant was, if there’s ever anything about your story that’s awkward or uncomfortable, maybe some misgiving you have about how you gathered your material, something you might be inclined to sweep under the rug for whatever reason, put it in the story! Don’t hide your concerns – express them. You’re worried, say, that it wasn’t fair to interview this guy so soon after his partner died? Say so.

In a way, Adam’s advice reminds me of a line from So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed: ‘Our shame-worthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world.’ If you reduce that space to nothing, you’re more likely to be invincible. Look at MAGA world. They’ve learned to be balls-out about their crimes / sins / bad behavior, and now they’re like post-shame supervillains, hospital superbugs impervious to treatment. It feels like the only way a MAGA person can be brought down these days is if they’re accused of having sex with someone underage. And even then a lot of them get away with it.

Whereas if you’re a pop science author who presents yourself as wise and brilliant and above the fray, and it turns out you slightly fabricated a quote, it can be over for you for the rest of life. It’s because everyone hates hypocrisy.

But that’s not what Adam meant when he said “Put it in there”, nor was it the reason why his advice felt so important to me. I think he was speaking to something big and profound about an author’s relationship with their story, something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Which is: Who’s in charge? Your story or you?

I had a terrible moment in 2003. I was making a documentary for Channel 4 called Kidneys for Jesus about a religious sect called The Jesus Christians who were giving their spare kidneys to strangers. A young member called Casey was about to donate his kidney and I suggested to the group’s leader Dave McKay that because Casey had only been in the group for a few weeks, and he was just 22 or something, perhaps he could be given a cooling off period before deciding whether to go ahead with the surgery. Also, I thought Dave was being a little Machiavellian in general, and I said as much in a Guardian article that was published while we were still filming.

Yes, it was definitely a mistake for me to publish an article while I was still filming. I don’t know what I was thinking. Anyway, Dave hit the roof. He pulled the plug on the filming. He emailed me that my exclusion was ‘permanent. You have only reaped what you have sown. Love, Dave.’

Having access withdrawn in an access-dependent story is theoretically the worst thing that can happen. If a story is a river, and you’re a twig in the river going wherever the current takes you, I had just hit a massive dam.

I’d already spent £50K of Channel 4’s money and I had no film. I was panicking. I remember panicking to my wife, Elaine. And she said, “Who’s in charge of this story? Dave or you? Make the film about this!”

It was the same point Adam was making years later: My story shouldn’t be some artifice, separate from the reality of making the story. I should narrow that space to nothing. Because if I do that, I’ll be regaining control of it. I’ll be in charge again.

But how would I do that with the Jesus Christians? How could I reflect the drama of losing access in a way that would move the narrative forward?

As it happens, with Dave McKay I got lucky. He didn’t go silent on me. He started messaging me a LOT to explain my faults to me. For months I’d wake up to find scathing emails from him about my lack of integrity. So eventually I made him an offer: If I publicly apologized to him in the film, could I get my access back?

The Jesus Christians were DELIGHTED. They immediately invited me round and one of them – Roland – started composing my public apology for me: “‘Hello, I’m Jon Ronson,’” he began. “‘I must apologize for my article, blah blah blah. I said this. That was wrong. And I guess I’ve been doing it for many years. Reading into things or trying to make them more exciting and in my zeal I misrepresented a few things and I apologize.”

“For MANY YEARS?’” I thought.

Suddenly the drama had become funny. And soon after that it became horrific. Dave messaged to say a woman in Scotland called Christine was dying of kidney failure and he WOULD have instructed one of his members to give her a kidney but if he did I’d only accuse him of manipulation so he’d decided to let her die and let her death be on my conscience.

Dave and Cherry McKay

(By the way, Christine wasn’t as sick as Dave had made her out to be. Although I don’t know what’s happened to her since.)

You might be thinking, “Well, Jon got lucky there. How does this anecdote help me if I’ve lost access to a story and the guy ISN’T emailing me every five minutes with excellent material?”

Yes, there will be times when stories become irrevocable disasters. But in general if you think of yourself as being in charge of your story in this way, it can make your life a lot easier, and your story better too.

To return to my river analogy - if there’s an obstacle in the river, the water finds a way around it. You desperately want access to someone and you don’t get it? Find a way around it, because the story has to go on. And who knows, if you’re forced to think differently because things didn’t work out how you wanted, it might end up BETTER than you imagined.

Also, if you’re in charge of your story you’re also in charge of how it FEELS. With my new book I’m loving mashing up the genres. One minute it’s memoir, the next it’s an adventure, the next it’s an investigation. When I started out in journalism I’d never have had the confidence to do that. But that’s another thing I mean about taking charge of your story. You can get to a place where you feel so in charge of it you can start to experiment in genre-mashing ways.

Okay, next week I’ll write about the qualm I alluded to above, and talk about when we can worry TOO MUCH about the ethics of a story.

In the meantime, tomorrow I’m coming to the UK for a week! The Man From Delmonte, a band I managed in the ‘80s, are playing for the first time in 34 years at Manchester’s Band on the Wall on Wednesday Feb 26 and I’ll be there to introduce them.

On Feb 27 I’m going to see You Me Bum Bum Train. Everyone says it’s life changing, so it had better be.

On March 1 I’m DJing at Scared to Dance in Dalston, starting at 10pm. Some tickets are still available, bafflingly.

Then on March 2 I’ll be on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch talking about the next and probably final leg of Psychopath Night.

Ok bye!

Jon