In a guest post on Jane Friedman’s blog, Jennifer Browdy says that switching from memoir to fiction can help you write about painful true stories from your life.
When writing memoir, we often discover we can’t share interesting, memorable stories, because they don’t fit the point we hope to make or because the truth would not reflect well on real-world people. While we may not include them in our memoirs, those stories never really go away.
“My advice? Go ahead and write the true story down, fair and square,” Browdy says. “But don’t stop there. Take the true story as your rough draft and keep going, giving yourself permission to tell the truth…in fiction.”
In fiction, we can tell harsh truths through the lens of imagination. “Start sketching, until you feel like you know your new main character and narrator intimately,” Browdy writes. “Then go back to the key scenes from your memories of your youthful romance, and retell them, imagining what might have happened if you had known then what you know now.”
Use the memory, emotion, and sensory detail of your real life to create compelling, immersive fiction. “As you transmute lived sorrow into imagined victory, you will feel your own spirit growing lighter, released from the weight of your heavy memories,” Browdy says. “Shifting purposefully from memoir to fiction, we not only do no harm to the still-living people who inhabit our memories, but we also ignite the process of transforming the coal of true but painful stories into diamonds that can shine a bright light for ourselves, and for others.”
