How true is true?

All my novels are fiction based on life experiences with some added twists and of course the changing of names of people and some locations. As I write I relive some of the experiences and some nights the dreams can be a rude awakening.

Tom - are you writing it as a fiction piece or as a memoir?

Memoir has always existed in that interstitial area now labeled "creative non-fiction." Some creative non-fiction is more creative; some is more non-fiction. Memory is an uncertain record at best. So memoir can't offer the reader historical accuracy, but only the remembered, lived experience of one person. Being true to your memory is important. Being true to all external facts is not. Especially since too obsessive a concentration on factual accuracy is a major strategy our silencing voices use to keep us from ever telling our story in the first place.

Like Participant Observation & other forms of narrative research in Social Science, memoir offers emotional & sensory depth not available in more factual accounts. OTOH, it is very limited in scope - not only to what one person experienced, but what one person remembers experiencing - often after decades of editing the memory to meet ongoing personality needs.

example: Say, I'm a pathologically shy person telling the story of learning to be social. I had this close friend who cajoled me to attend a small, intimate party. My host insisted she'd invited only a few guests, most of whom I already knew, so it would be safe. I got there and the house was crawling, absolutely crawling, with people. I only recognized one guy & not well enough that I would ever try to make small talk to him - even if I could make small talk. I spent the evening miserably hunkered down in a corner, wondering how to make my escape. It was two years before I worked up the courage to go to a social gathering again. I chewed & edited the memory over many years until I finally wrote it into my story.

Another person at the exact same party was hyper-social, new in town, & eager to make new acquaintances. He went to the party with high expectations, but was massively disappointed that there weren't more than 10 people, most of whom he'd already met. It's a strong memory because it was iconic of how hard it was to make new friends in that town & why he soon moved.

So how many people were at the party? Even if it was possible to find a record of the actual number, does it matter? The point of each person's memoir is to tell the capitol 'T' truth about their life experience.

Yes, some aspects must be kept factual. Yet, other facts must be released in service to the Truth, eg number of minor characters. If I was in the monastery for 18 months, I can't call it "memoir" when I write a story about being a monk for ten years. But I can telescope events that happened over months to days or weeks, or cut the number of characters. After all, even in a book-length work, I can't have dozens of minor characters although dozens of people actually intersected my story. In a short story, I have to cut even more characters.

I have to admit, I've spent way too long trying to figure out if my memory of coal smells on the trains to school means British Railways was still using steam engines on those lines at that time. Steam trains were still common in the early 60s, but BR went through a major upheaval in the late 60s when the last were junked. Maybe I'm just transposing the coal-smell memory from the general, coal-fired-boiler smell that permeated so much English village life. I don't remember excessive coal dust on the trains to school like I experienced on a coal-fired steam train on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Yet, I have no hesitation about not only changing names, but making composite characters - not just because people have become mixed up in my memory, but so people can't ID themselves.

This choice creates an ongoing tussle for writers of any kind of creative non-fiction. We each arrive at our own sense of best way to tell a particular story. Couple that with up-front honesty with your readers - use of composite characters (a common strategy), etc. & you are good.

Well, I'm still not sure if I am writing fiction informed by true events or memoir. I think maybe my doldrums are turning on this issue to some extent. When camp started, going for a more realistic, adult, first person sparked off my writing. Now I'm think I need to go the other way - let loose with some wild invention and see what happens. I can always remove it later.

Thanks for the encouragement, Bird. 'Though it's got to be tomorrow as today, I'm working 8:30 am to 9 pm (just stopped by for a mo.)

I ended up just not caring - all first person, but present tense, past tense, as if MC is writing a journal, with sensory detail putting the reader in the scene, totally fictionalized, strictly what I remember. Whatever took my fancy in the moment for that scene, I went for it.

What I have now at 90+k words is maybe 2/3 of a big, semi-sorted dump of memories - the unknitted, raw material that could be remade into many kinds of story from pure memoir to novel, middle grade to adult.

Any one book will have to be consistent, but letting go of all these worries was the only way to get out of my major, mid-month writing block.

(That line is full of potential. Seriously, it's one of those that instantly make you want to know the 'why' behind it.
Just saying.)

Does anyone else get exhausted emotionally writing in this category?