Truth or Fiction Writing?
Memoir is about writing fact – you are telling the truth. Fiction Writing is about using your imagination. Autobiographical Fiction is taking nuggets of your life experiences and translating them into Fiction. It is a very powerful form of writing. So if you have a burning feeling within to write your story, but you don’t want to expose yourself or others. What can you do?
In memoir writing, it is not always easy, for various reasons, to write every truthful detail about the events and experiences in your life.
Perhaps the changes that would unfold by the honesty or truth of a situation would change the course of a life, or lives. Or perhaps you feel it is just not the time for the truth to be known.
You’ve probably thought of writing your experience as fiction. But perhaps Fiction doesn’t feel like your genre either.
Autobiographical Fiction is the answer. By using nuggets of your life experiences, and flipping them into fiction – provides a whole new resource of writing material.
Imagine a family secret that you feel a need to express… yet writing about it feels very wrong indeed, for whatever reason. You just cannot bring yourself to commit the details to print. Talking about the people it effected feels wrong. And the place it happened in would expose so many. BUT, you want to express this story. You feel the need to express this story – and how it impacted your life.
What a great resource of material!
Take the incident you feel uncomfortable writing about. Put it into a whole new setting. Even a different country, or part of the country. Take the characters, change them. Change everything about them, maybe even their gender. Imagine a completely different situation for the nugget of your story to take place in. This is what writing Autobiographical Fiction is about.
Autobiographical Fiction is a powerful form of writing. Don’t underestimate it!
The reader will never know it’s a life experience that happened to you!
Sin a bhfuil anois. (that’s it for now)
Irene G.
Founder
The Creative Writer’s Workshop
The Memoir Writing Club
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