This is an adaptation of a very short and quite self-indulgent talk I gave at Sarah Lawrence last week. The best part was definitely the Q&A. The people in SLC’s writing program are super smart and they asked the best questions. I wish I remembered any of them. One person pointed out that I contradict myself here several times, and she was right! Oh well. It’s not like there’s a right answer to this question. But this is my attempt to help us both figure it out.
How do you know whether fiction or memoir is the mode you should pick in order to tell the story you’re trying to tell?
Sometimes, the answer to this question is extremely obvious. I remember feeling insulted by the suggestion that my first book could have been anything besides a memoir. Specifically, I felt insulted when my Mom was like, “Why couldn’t you just have written a novel?” I was all, “BECAUSE, Mom. I needed to do it this way (eyeroll).” I was, I guess, 27? 28? My Mom is an extremely tolerant hero, by the way.
But my point is that I didn’t really think about it as a choice, or at least, not as a conscious choice. And then after it was done, and out in the world, and causing my mom to say stuff like that, I thought, “Well, obviously if I had any idea how to write a novel, I would have done that. People would have liked it more and I wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble with everyone I know.”
To some extent I think it’s true that the books we end up writing are simply the only books we’re capable of writing at that point in our lives. But as I got older and my approach to my own work became a little bit more sophisticated, and also I got more cowed and hardened and cynical about how our industry works, I did start thinking about the choice between fiction and nonfiction as something that could be deployed consciously and deliberately, not arrived at by some process of magic and fate and hope and chance.
Both modes of writing have their privileges and their drawbacks. If you want to just scroll down, I have listed some of them here! But first I thought I would share with you my experience of what writing and revising my first novel was like, being as honest about it as possible, and then we can hopefully extrapolate some lessons from my experience that will save us all from making the mistakes I made as we work on our next books.
There’s a story that I’ve been telling as I’ve gone around and done interviews about Friendship that is a partly true, dramatically oversimplified version of what I was thinking about and aiming for when I first began working on the book four years ago. I told it last week when I was asked to speak at my alma mater, Eugene Lang, and as I was talking I was struck by how self-serving this version is, and how unlikely it is to help anyone who’s working on a book that might be a novel or might be a memoir. It made me feel like I might be guilty of doing something that has always irked me, which is when authors, in interviews, explain that the characters in their books “came to life” and “told them what they wanted to happen,” or something along those lines. I hate it when people give some kind of magic credit for what I believe is actually, for everyone, inevitably just hard, often boring work of writing and revision. At the same time, though, I know what those assholes mean when they say that stuff, and I understand why they say it. My version of it is that I tell a story about being traumatized by the critical reaction to And The Heart Says Whatever, being unable to write in the first person, feeling like Ariel after Ursula the Sea Witch takes her voice and puts it in the little seashell necklace, realizing I had to figure out a workaround, then starting out writing in the third person as an exercise. Boom: Friendship! Voila! Magic!
While that is, in some sense, what happened, the longer and less magical and possibly more boring version is that I consciously decided that I would teach myself how to write a novel by writing a novel, with a couple of strong influences and models firmly in mind. One of them was a book called Torpor by the author Chris Kraus, a novelist whose work is often explicitly autobiographical. For instance, the heroine and partial narrator of her first novel, I Love Dick, is named Chris Kraus. I Love Dick is written partly in the third person and partly in the first person. The heroine of Torpor, which is written in the third person, is named Sylvie Green, and the whole novel is written in the third person, but to readers of I Love Dick its characters are immediately familiar as versions of Chris and her now-ex husband Sylvere — although now I realize that plenty of made-up shit does happen in it. Still, when I first read this book, I thought, oh! So that is a possible and valid artistic choice.
The problem, for me, was that unlike Chris Kraus, I did not at that point have an interesting enough life to get away with simply writing about the events of my own life as if they were happening to someone else. I know this because I wrote an entire draft of Friendship in which basically nothing happened that hadn’t happened to me. What this meant, in effect, was that nothing happened. It was a very boring book. The characters in it walked around and talked to each other. It could have worked in a movie, maybe. I don’t even really like that kind of movie, though.
In order for something to happen to them that hadn’t happened to me, the transparently veiled versions of me and my best friend and my boyfriend in this boring-ass proto-book had to become characters. They had to be capable of making decisions I wouldn’t make in response to things that had never happened to me or anyone I know, but they still had to be familiar and real enough to me that I would understand their decisions and be able to imagine their thoughts and reactions. Slowly, and with many false starts, I began to work by trial and error, experimenting with things that they could do, stopping when something seemed too far-fetched or phony, throwing out pages and pages of work, then starting again after I’d figured out what had gone wrong.
Writing that mumblecore draft of my book was not a waste of time, or at least, not entirely. Though very few vestiges of it remain in the book that was ultimately published, all of that experience of simply having the people in the book walk around and talk to each other did give me the rudimentary ideas about what kinds of people they were, what they were capable of, and what kinds of thoughts they could have. If I’d come at the book from the other direction, which I believe is more traditional — ie, coming up with the rough outlines of a narrative first, and then fleshing it out and populating it with characters — I don’t think the book would have worked. There’s still not quite enough happening in it that it would be able to sustain anyone’s attention because of its page-turning plot. And the truth is that while plot and pacing and rhythm of a story are very important, they are also pretty easy to graft on or rip off or refine in the revision process.
So that is my example of how something that begins as something flapping around in the amorphous gray area between nonfiction and fiction can become fiction. What can we learn from it? For starters, we learn that writing fiction has a lot of drawbacks.
The downsides of writing fiction:
1. Unless you have a narrator who tells the story in the first person, you can’t rely on the built-in immediacy of directly addressing an audience to keep readers interested. And really I think writing fiction in the first person is usually a bad idea, unless you’re writing YA or you are an incredibly confident and experienced writer and you are down to hone the shit out of what seems to me the incredibly difficult task of narrating a whole book in a voice that isn’t yours — the writerly equivalent of an actor doing a whole role in an accent, basically. A really tough accent like a Scottish or South African accent.
2. By the same token, you get a bit more leeway in memoir to be boring because, to some extent, people stay interested in something simply because it actually happened and so they want to find out what happened. In fiction, you are going to have to create some special effects in order to keep readers sticking around.
3. You have to make shit up. This comes easily to some people, not as easily to others. Writing about shit that actually happened as if you have made it up can work, but not all the time. Just as in memoir, you will have to exercise your judgment and cull out all the details that aren’t important to the story. And if you’re going to have to go to the trouble of doing that anyway, you might as well just make shit up, because after all …
The upsides of writing fiction:
1. You can make shit up! You can collapse time, create excuses for characters to be in the same room because it’s convenient for you, et cetera. Hell, you can invent entire countries and languages and universes if that’s what you’re into. Even if not, you can still kill people off if they start to irritate you. I took a lot of pleasure and comfort in sometimes, when I was completely frustrated with writing my book, just quickly writing a scene where at that exact point in the action all the characters died in some painful and exhausting way. This was a waste of time, obviously, but as wastes of time go it definitely beats getting into a recreational fight on Twitter.
2. People will take your book more seriously. They will assume that it was a lot harder to write than a memoir, because you went to the trouble of making all that shit up. What they don’t understand, probably, are the downsides of memoir.
The downsides of writing memoir:
One of the biggest downsides of writing memoir is that cultural and critical expectations of first-person nonfiction writing are incredibly unclear right now. It’s possible that they have always been unclear, but to me it seems like the last ten years have muddied some already fairly muddy waters. I want to talk about my experience of writing memoir without, as much as possible, getting into a conversation about What Is Truth and stuff like that. What I believe is that as long as it isn’t your intent to deceive or hurt anyone, and you’re using all the tools at your disposal to be as honest as you can possibly be and still tell anything like a good story, you’re probably in the clear, ethics-wise. Different people perceive events differently and how someone else perceives what happened in the story you’re telling from your perspective is not your problem. However, if you are being self-serving, or using your storytelling skills to make someone else look bad or grind an axe, you deserve to catch some flak for that. Those things are a misuse of memoir. The point of memoir is to use the built-in advantages of the form to get people to pay attention to stories they might otherwise overlook or never encounter.
You don’t have to be a celebrity to write memoir, or to have experienced something obviously fascinating like being a child soldier or a worker in a heavily trafficked nail salon. It is crazy to me how many people think that memoir is about having a great story to tell. If anything, having an obviously great story is an impediment to writing great first-person nonfiction. With a decent editor, probably almost anyone can turn their child soldier experience into something saleable and baseline readable. Taking a more quotidian experience and rendering it into something more takes skill, or at least just a raw knack for this kind of work.
Another downside of writing memoir is that if you do it right you will have told the truth, and no one will ever love you for telling the truth.
The upsides of writing memoir:
1. People will pay attention to what you’re saying just because there’s a person there talking. It feels ruder to close a book written in the first person than it does to close a novel.
2. If you are young and cute, your book will probably get more attention than it would if it were a novel. A lot of the attention might be condescending and sexist, but it will still probably enable you to make some money, at least temporarily.
3. You get to tell the truth — unequivocally and without any ambiguity about what you were setting out to do. For some subjects, using yourself as the medium of the truth and being its spokesperson is the only way to get your point across. And if this is the case, you will know.
