I've just started a novel from a rough idea I've got and the primary setting is my home town exactly as it was when I was growing up in the 60s. In fact some of my characters and houses are very real descriptions of people (with name changes) and buildings. The people I'm partially modeling my characters on are all deceased. I intend to use the same setting and the the people with their real names in a memoir too. God knows if the novel will ever be published, or the memoir, but if they both were, would that seem a little odd?
If the novel is well written I think if it and the memoir were published it wouldn't be so weird. If I were to read the novel first as I probably would and discovered the memoir I would be intrigued. It wouldn't seem so strange, maybe a way as to honor peoples memories. I wouldn't think it weird but a very respectable thing to do. Having said that I should probably explain what I meant by "well written," as long as you're able to mix the details of the novel and the real world I'd be happy with it. However, this has some potential risk since research must be done for things to fit well together. Then you have to make it believable to a certain extent, it might seem strange if you make things less realistic or you warp the details to your liking too much. I'm imagining a mature and realistic novel, maybe a novel that teaches me something about these characters. It'd be really impactful to be able to get attached to these characters and find out their real counterparts are deceased. So in short, I see a lot of potential in this idea and a lot of pitfalls. Keep it up, I think this could be a really intriguing story. If you leave it to your judgment to solve anything that looks strange and make it a (powerful?) book you enjoy to read then I believe there are always people who would like it as well. I hope this answers some questions, gives you some insight, or basically anything I can offer you. I'm (kinda) an amateur writer, and I love stories and their execution, also the emotional bonds that I form with them. -Macklin
Imagine you're the reader. Why would you read two books with the same story? Would the fact that one is sold as "real events" and the other as "fiction" be enough to make you read both?
I think it's a good thing. Imagine if the fiction version was fantastic - all your 'fans' would want to read the memoir. Publishers would like the money...
Just make sure you're not telling the same story twice and calling one fiction and the other nonfiction. Even when we base characters off of real people or settings off a real places, in fiction we can (and should, in my opinion) take advantage of the freedom to make it our own. I'm a little confused my your use of the term plagiarize. Were you thinking you could just lift passages out of your novel and reuse them in your memoir? I would say that's a no. I think you really just have to make sure that you are dealing with different stories. And if that's the case, I would alter the characters and setting enough in the novel so that it doesn't seem too familiar to readers. Your memoir isn't the sequel of your novel.
"Were you thinking you could just lift passages out of your novel and reuse them in your memoir?" No, but the passage below really happened to me. It is also in my first draft of a scene for a novel. So if I do include it in a novel, at the very least, when writing my recollections of growing up in a remote village on the Pacific Coast coast of Canada in the 1950s and 60s I'd have to rephrase it. Before he turned around he looked at the approximate place where old Einar had his boat the Adanac. He’d loved everything about that old boat, even the foul smelling bilge water when Einar had let him pump it out with the old hand pump. He’d even spent a week traveling up the coast with old Einar when he was 12, visiting the lighthouse at Scarlet Point and booming some logs at Deep Bay on the other side of Nelson Bay. He slept down below in the engine room next to the big old 2-cyclinder Atlas engine. “Don’t you go and piss in the flywheel pan like that Jackie McNally did,” Einar ordered him the first night. Martin could still hear the “Ka-chuff, ka-chuff “sound of the Atlas engine in his mind.
I know a columnist who was fired for reusing material she had already used. She changed the wording around and there were years between when she first wrote something and when she tried to use it again. If you write and publish a story, you can't just write the same thing over again and stick a new label or title on it. Your agent or publisher can best explain these practices and what is and isn't okay. But you're still writing your novel. I would focus on that and making the story more original and engaging than true. Worry about your next book when it's time to start working on your next book. I wouldn't plan on using the same things for both. That's just what think.
