Not My Biography, Exactly

In the last post, using anecdotes as starter dough, I encouraged you to use your own biography as a launching pad for a story. The end product doesn’t have to resemble the initiating thought and may take you to an entirely different place than the ‘real’ story.

But while I think it is a great idea, there’s one caveat. This can be a way, however inadvertent, to slide into retelling the story so that your David wins against Goliath, your weasel against the lion.

The temptation in writing your own biography

In giving yourself permission to take off from the original memory into something possibly quite different, there can be a lure to weave the new story in a way where you look better/smarter/more prescient than you did in real life. I stood up to the bully and didn’t slink away; my ridicule was actually a gentle joke. It’s easy to shape things so that the story turns out as you wished it had or what you want people to believe.

Trust me, it almost always turns out to be way more compelling writing if you stick with the truth. I know it sounds as if I’m talking out of both sides of mouth—take flights of fancy  and stick with the truth.

But the truth I am talking about is emotional truth. I don’t care if you change your school yard to another planet or make the stakes earth-shattering rather than hurt feelings. But I do care whether the underlying emotion is real. If you can capture the feelings when you let the bully to beat up another kid, so long as you were safe or the consequences of being less than what you aspire to, then the story can take off in any direction you like and still be true.

Memoir or fiction?

You would think that how close you need to stay to the truth would depend on whether you are writing fiction or a memoir. More truthful for a memoir, not so important for fiction.

Well, maybe, but it isn’t as easy as all that. For one thing, the two genres are often conflated. More than one author has used actual events in his fiction and we have all read memoires which we know have got to be more fiction than fact.

Sometimes this conflation seems purposeful. I didn’t want to be President anyhow; I was never wrong. But other times, the mixing of the genres may not be intentional. As I mentioned in my last post, I wrote a whole sub-plot which I thought was auto-biographical until my sister pointed out the event had happened to her rather than me.

But examples of this bleed between genres don’t have to be as blatant. You may use an anecdote whose interpretation is obvious, only to discover that another participant in the event remembers it completely differently. One of you is talking fiction but you’ll probably never figure out who.

Truthfully, I just can’t get worried about what genre you call your manuscript. As long as you keep close to that core of emotional truth wherever the story takes you, your writing will have the ring of reality to which readers respond.