From FACT to FICTION

American literary critic Leslie Fiedler once wrote: “Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.”

If you’re a novelist considering writing a memoir, or a memoirist writing a novel, you’ll probably discover there are some strong likenesses between the two. In a memoir, just as you don’t tell your entire life story, in a novel, you don’t try to tell everything you could possibly tell about your protagonist. In both cases, you focus on the story you’re trying to tell. Readers don’t want to know everything – they only want the things that count, that matter most.

If you’ve read very many memoirs, you also see that they, like novels, are rich with scenes and dialogue, not just plain narration. Whether you’re writing fact or fiction, you must hone your scene-writing skills – a boon for writers switching genres, because these skills will already be in your repertoire.

That said, the two are bottom-line different genres, and different rules surely apply to each. If you’re considering switching from a novel to a memoir (or vice versa), what should you know before you begin? We asked five writers with published memoirs as well as novels for their expert advice.

Spicing up your scenes – in both memoir and novel

How do you make a dull, uninteresting scene in a memoir more compelling? Do you use basically the same techniques you use in a novel? Second, in memoir writing, how much are you bound to what “really happened?” After all, how accurate is memory, anyway? Can a memoir be spiritually true if not factually true?

Let’s look at each of these questions, beginning with scene writing.

According to Sheila Kohler, author of 10 novels, three story collections, and a memoir, scenes are important in memoir, and the “technique is very similar in fiction and nonfiction: all the old tricks apply…foreshadowing, or hinting at what is up ahead,