I've been working on a memoir for the last three months but have found that significant portions of chapters are starting to read like a novel. It remains an accurate story of my life, but I've used descriptive storytelling to convey emotion. I'm curious if anybody has experience threading the needle between the two genres. When does a memoir become fiction? How much liberty can you take in a memoir? The overall message (the resilience of the human spirit, the journey toward self-acceptance, the power of facing one's fears) will be much more powerful as nonfiction.
Well, if it's a memoir, I'd imagine that you have to stick to the facts. But that doesn't mean you have to avoid descriptive story-telling. As you say, that can convey emotion. Turning it into a fictional novel, will free you up to enhance the story-telling, and maybe you can still get your message across.
When it's not true. The level of description or style is irrelevant. So is "plotting" it in a way that makes it read like a novel, feeling as if the outcome isn't known yet. Of course, it isn't hard either to embellish a mostly true story or series of events into a work of fiction.
In purely practical terms, you may have a better chance of selling it as fiction than as memoir unless you're famous or your experience is truly epic.
Thank you all for your thoughtful replies. This is a passion project and not my career, so economic factors are not driving my decisions. In any event, I don't think this would have a market either way. My story is somewhat unique, but not that unique or extraordinary. I feel I have something to add to the conversation given that I've never found the other books tackling this theme to leave me with a message powerful enough to match the experience. My plan is to continue writing this as a memoir since it is all true, despite using narrative techniques to immerse the reader in the experience. Thanks again!
Lots of memoirs are immersive and read/structure as if they're novels, so that's a good plan. Example: you don't have to start a chapter with "In 1977, I killed a lion with my bare hands while on safari in Namibia" and then go on to explain the event like the true story in ancient history it was. You can write the event straight up as it happened and have it play out "live."
