Yesterday, I was attacked in the street by a 12-year-old.
Writer Ariane Sherine’s highly-intelligent daughter was telling me how, in drama classes at school, she had been taught to (stage) fight.
She demonstrated this by repeatedly punching me in the face (but stopping short of physical contact) and delivering flying kicks to my body (but stopping short of physical contact).
Each time I was saved from physical harm by about an inch or maybe two. But I was increasingly slightly worried she might miscalculate. I feared (slightly) for the potential physical impact. The odds, I felt, would shorten the longer she demonstrated.
Which reminded me of a blog I posted here twelve years ago about writing an autobiography.
My opinion was and is that people are interested in people not in facts.
People are primarily interested in people.
Which brings us back to Ariane’s daughter’s demonstration of her stage-fighting technique.
I read an analysis when I was at college of how people watch screen violence. The study was able to use cameras to see exactly at which point in the screen the subjects’s eyes were concentrating.
Their results were not what I would have thought in advance but made sense when I thought about it.
If, for example, on screen, someone shoots or punches a person in the stomach, the victim will double over as the bullet/fist hits. If they are punched on the chin, their head will jerk backwards or sideways with the force of the punch.
So what does the audience look at?
The viewer does not look at the victim’s stomach as the bullet or punch hits. They look at the victim’s face. They do not watch the action; they watch the re-action.
When someone is punched on the chin, they do not look at the point of impact. They do not look at the chin. They look at the eyes and facial reaction of the victim. Of course they do. It seems obvious,
The point is that they watch the re-action not the action.
They are not primarily concentrating on the act or the fact of the action. They concentrate on the emotional and physical reaction of the person.
Because people are primarily interested in people’s emotions and emotional reactions, not isolated, cold facts.
That’s equally important in writing autobiographies (or thrillers) as it is in filming action or even comedy films.
‘Man (or woman or other) slips on a banana skin’ is only interesting in so far as it affects a person.
They are interested in re-actions more than actions.
People are interested in people not abstract facts, except insofar as they affect people.
It’s all about people, people.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 
Something I’ve noticed after reading quite a lot of autobiographies: they’re often great in the childhood years, good in the teen years, then tiresome in adulthood.
My theory is that, when they write about their youth, they focus on what was subjectively important to them at the time: the stuff that left a mark on memory. It’s not the kind of detail you find in history books. It could be a passage about the tree on the corner of the block, or an aunt with a wart on her nose, or the time they saw the backroom at the dry-cleaners. But it’s fascinating for us because it was fascinating for them as they lived it.
Then, in adulthood, it becomes a list of “important” events: marriage, divorce, new movie, dinner with the pope, etc.
Ah, yes. Very good and interesting point.