A journal is your real voice—and should show you why you want to change your real voice for the book.

Cynthia Ozick said:

Since 1953 I’ve kept a diary, and I write in it almost every day. It’s a record of humiliation. The voice in it is my speaking voice. It carries all of life in it, all the dross and all the bad feelings, the humiliations, the anger, the envy, all that garbage. I know that it is a real voice, and that’s how I know all the other voices are constructs or masks.

Vivian Gornick was writing about her mother in the memoir that became Fierce Attachments when she reviewed her own diary and had the same reaction as Ozick:

I opened the diary eagerly but soon turned away from it, stricken. The writing was soaked in a kind of girlish self-pity—“alone again!—that I found odious. More than odious, threatening. As I read on, I felt myself being sucked back into its atmosphere, unable to hold on to the speaking voice I was working hard to develop.

Surely this has happened to all of us. You get excited about a story you want to tell, and run to your journal to harvest a few juicy details. Read a few pages. By the time you’ve finished, you’re wondering why in god’s name made you think this event was interesting.  Journal entries are too unfiltered, too personal, too much a record of what you were feeling on a particular day –and who writes in a journal on a good day? In Volume 1 of Virginia Woolf’s published journals, she passed a line of mental patients and writes, “They should certainly be killed.”

Probably not the voice she wants to use in public.

Idea: Compare the writing in your journal about some event with how you write about that same event in your memoir.

Rarely will your journal voice be the one you want. Certainly it wasn’t the one Gornick wanted. “The one I habitually lived with wouldn’t do at all: it whined, it grated, it accused– above all it accused.”

There you have it—our real selves. This is why I distrust the oft-heard advice to “write from the heart.” As my journal and anybody else’s shows, what’s in the heart is exactly what should NOT be shared:

 I was sick and he went off to see the solar eclipse.

It’s not fair to expect me to chitchat with a bald, scarred clearly dying woman while I’m waiting for my  first chemo session.

Virginia Woolf’s journals are famous, but in the complete version you come across, say,  the part where she passes a line of shambling mentally ill people and observes. “They should certainly be killed.”

Straight from the heart, that remark.

COURTNEY: I have a tip! I lost  forty pounds, and I have a real tip. I was fat from fourteen to twenty-four. When you’re fat like I was—which is five feet eight inches and 150 to 170 pounds—you do not get to fuck the boys you want to fuck. Right?…Right?

LISA: Perhaps.

COURTNEY: The minute I got skinny and got a nose job and became photogenic, all of a sudden I had a bidding war, and every boy I ever wanted wanted me.

LISA: What’s your tip?

COURTNEY: The thing you gotta do is: A.) Stop counting calories! Okay? B.) Do not get on a scale! Cause lean muscle weighs more than fat. All right? I an out FAT! That’s all you gotta do. FAT! No cheese. That’s it, Lisa. Period. NO CHEESE. I told this to KROQ, I told this to my nanny. People I tell this to lose ten, thirty pounds. STOP CHEESE. You know why Orientals are not fat? ‘Cause they look on cheese as this gross Western habit. It’s like sour milk—LARD. They don’t want anything to fucking do with cheese. If you’re gonna eat cheese, take it out on a picnic, cut it up carefully, and really taste it—with wine or something. Don’t melt it on shit. And I lost FORTY POUNDS by not eating cheese. And I even ate a little mayonnaise. All right? Skip the butter and skip the cheese and you will lose weight. I swear to God, Lisa.

LISA: Here’s my second question…

COURTNEY: Don’t eat cheese. There are a million things to eat that are not cheese.

Dear Crackhead,

Yes, you. You sick fucker. On Wednesday morning I emerged from my girlfriend’s building by U.N.Plaza to find that you had sawed the tops off both the sparkplugs on my motorcycle. At the time, I had no idea why anyone would do that. Other than the sparkplugs, the bike was untouched. Some kind of bizarre vandalism? A fraternity prank gone awry? I had no idea. All I knew is that I looked like a huge douchebag riding the Muni to work in a padded motorcycle jacket and helmet.

Because the bike was immobilized I got a $35 parking  ticket that night. Thursday I had it towed to the shop ($45) where they replaced the sparkplugs and the boots ($50 including labor). They explained to me that “people” — I use the term loosely here — like you break off the tops of spark plugs and use the porcelain tubes to smoke crack. As an engineer and former McGyver fan, in a way I think this is kind of cool. But then I remember that I just paid $100 for your  crackpipes, and I get angry again.

Crackhead, it was really good to have my bike back though. I rode home from the shop with a couple of spare sparkplugs and a smile on my face. I figured the next time I parked at my girlfriend’s place overnight I would have to buy some crackpipes and tape them to my bike as a peace offering. Overall, I wasn’t that upset. Despite having to ride the bus for three days and dropping a hundred bones at the shop, I had gained some fascinating knowledge, a new set of sparkplugs, and a pretty funny anecdote about how fucked up you are, and how our paths once crossed briefly in the night.

But you couldn’t just let sleeping dogs lie, could you Crackhead? You couldn’t just stay in on Friday, watch Letterman through the window of a home electronics store and then call it a night. You couldn’t rest on your laurels. Two porcelain sparkplug crackpipes just wasn’t enough for you, was it Crackhead? You just had to come back for more.

This morning, a scant fifteen hours after rode it out of the shop, I found my motorcycle violated once again. This time you only took the right one – maybe you were having an off night. At least this time 1 had a spare sparkplug and the tools to fix it, or so I thought, having ordered a 73-piece tool set from SEARS.com last week. But no, the sparkplug socket in my new set was for American sparkplugs. So I had to go down to the neighborhood Ace hardware. They had an 18mm socket that would fit over my sparkplug, but it was for a 1/2″ drive ratchet. My toolkit only has 1/4” and 3/8″ ratchets. So I had to buy a 1/2″ ratchet along with the socket. Even though the clerk took pity on me and gave me the senior citizen discount (Pm 25) it still cost me $22 all told. Now, you might say that I should have just gotten a 3/8″-to-1/2″ drive adaptor instead of springing for the whole ratchet. And to that I say “Shut the hell up, Crackhead, I’m not finished. And besides, I was eventually going to buy a 1/2^“ ratchet anyway so it^‘s probably not worth it to take it back now.”

OK, now I’m rambling. But the point is, Crackhead, that you have done me wrong. Now, I get that you love crack. That is totally understandable. I’ve heard it is really fun, at first, and quite addictive. What I don’t understand is,

YOU ARE A CRACKHEAD. WHY DON’T YOU OWN A CRACKPIPE?

I am an engineer. Do you ever see me shaking down bums in the Loin for a calculator and slide rule? No, you don’t. Because engineering is the main thing I do, I went and bought myself a calculator. The main thing you do is crack. How do you get by without a crackpipe? The other crackheads must clown on you non-stop. I  mean, the fucking saw you used to saw off my sparkplugs is probably worth five or ten bucks. Why not sell or trade it for a crackpipe? You really haven’t put much thought into this, have you?

lease, Crackhead, please don’t tell me you sold your crackpipe to buy crack. Even a stupid crackhead such as yourself couldn’t possibly be that stupid.

Matt

When the writing just lies there, chances are there’s nobody on the page desperately wanting something (and, even better, doing something to get it). Notice that the first or second song in any musical is  the ‘want’ song — “All I Want is a Room Somewhere.”

In the Stanislavski acting method, every character in a drama has a central desire or objective — a motivation — that drives him through each scene and through the story. (That’s why actors rehearsing a play stand around saying, “What’s my motivation?”)

The more specific you are about what you want, the more involved the reader will be in your efforts to get it. A vague desire, such as “I wanted to be happy” or “I wanted to be loved” will, by being broad enough to include almost everything that happened to you, set you and your reader adrift. Likewise, try not to use “I wanted to fit in” as your desire. Everybody wanted to fit in.

Here’s an  example  of “I wanted” sentences  taken from Heather Sellers’, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I know, a memoir of an unusually chaotic childhood (and one of the best memoirs I’ve read). Kids are usually towed around by their parents, and have few choices to make, but they can still be portrayed as doing whatever they can to affect their own fates –thus making themselves the action heroes we want our protagonists to be.

If I made my mother think I was in in her plan, I could sometimes redirect her. I’d help her look for the threatening trucks, then casually suggest a troll through Holley Apartments’ dirt parking lot. I wanted my father back.  We weren’t making it without him. For months, I’d been calling his work number after school, letting it ring for hours.

I wasn’t going to survive if I stayed with her. I was turning primitive. I was starting to eat paper again, like Ricky Spees.

Secretly, I was thinking of maybe moving in with my father. What had happened to him? Where was he?

Every afternoon, I got off the school bus and went straight to the mailbox, collected the mail, and read every word of every piece—everything. I even tried to read the long-paper lawyer mail, thick packets of gobbledygook, worse than my textbooks.

Fantasies are a great way to show what the narrator wants –you can draw them out with detail and image and scene, even though they exist only in imagination. Here’s Sellers’ again:

To get myself through the year, I began to cultivate an amalgamated Nancy Drew/Great Gatsby college fantasy: I would live in an old-fashioned dormitory, have my own room, my own bed, my own thoughts, library within walking distance.  All day people would talk about books and ideas, ideas just barely touched on in high school, like communism, France, schwa e, impasto.  I imagined a boyfriend with oatmeal linen pants and horn-rimmed glasses and a nice, old-fashioned slow sedan from the 1940s or 1950s; we would walk holding hands and go to soda shops, and I would wear plaid skirts and glasses and carry piles of books secured with a rubber strap.  His mother would live in a mansion; I would glide down her hallways in white floaty dresses.

Want to see a great kid narrator, one who can tell us exactly what he wants? Look at this passage from Donuthead, a book about  fifth grader named Franklin Delano Donuthead:

I willed myself to lean forward and concentrate. Really this was very simple if I just broke it down into a physics problem. This was all about velocity. My bat would repel this sphere at high velocity.

My mother wound up. Despite my mental preparations, I froze in position as the ball sailed past, dangerously close to my nose. But I didn’t step back or drop the bat, which was, I believe, a minor victory worth celebrating.

Sarah tossed the ball back to my mother. We repeated this exercise several times. Everyone seemed to understand that a person with my delicate constitution required a great deal of warming up.

He wants something. He wants  to hit the ball.  The rest of the passage is about great voice, drawing an eccentric, surprising character. How  many kids say things like, “which was, I believe, a minor victory worth celebrating.” Or regard hitting the ball as a matter of physics? Who  wouldn’t want to spend time with a kid who can look at his own ineptness with irony and dry wit.

Can you name several  actions you (the narrator) take over the course of the story to get what you want?I mean actual things that can happen, as opposed to internal thoughts and feelings. If you can’t, your desire line might be too vague. (“I wanted to be happy.”) Or you might have chosen to write about an experience in which you have no real role to play—bad things happened that you didn’t cause and can’t do anything about.

I wanted___

I wanted it because ______

(backstory –this is where character comes in)

To get it,  I _____________

(action)

But something got in my way _____

I had to try something different, so I ______

(There may be one or two of these action-reaction-outcome sequences for an essay, but much more for a memoir)

Enter the book at five different points (doesn’t matter whether this material exists on paper yet or not) and insert an “I wanted” paragraph.

Here’s me trying to insert an “I wanted” into a particularly powerless moment, that of my birth:

It’s January 3, 1952, year of siren sheaths, ponytails, hot rods, and flying saucer sightings, We’re in a delivery room at the free clinic at UC Medical Center in San Francisco. and I am trying to be born. I am head down and ready to swim to the light. But no one is paying attention. I knock insistently. There’s a birthday party going on outside, and I can’t get to it. “She’s so pretty!” someone  says.   “She gets that from me,” says my mother’s familiar voice.

I knock again, harder. Let me out, goddamit. Oh!” my mother  says  throatily.  Her strong 24-year-old muscles clench down on me. The doctor –an intern, actually, -turns in the doorway in surprise. “What are you doing?” he said. “You just had your kid.” (He really did say that). But I am in the  slide, I am accelerating, my mother lets out a grunt, and  minutes later I am set down on the weighing table next to my twin sister Adrian.

Ten days later my father came in his red Chevy truck to take us home to Stinson Beach.  I was thinking hard. So, a twin. I could handle a twin. My mother was as big as a room, as big as a mountain, with long freckled arms. I could afford to share her with that other damp six-pound bundle next to me on the jouncing seat.

Then two days later, my father slapped  a copy of the Stinson Beach News down on my mother’s bed. “Five Children Under the Age of Five,” said the headline.

No. The younger self is, in a sense, a fictional character. Everybody who appears in a book is. We call this character the persona.

The persona is what makes the voice in memoir work. And not just in memoir, of course. Personas are why meeting writers can be  disappointing. you’re meeting the real person, a grump intending on getting out of the bookstore as fast as possible, and not the charming persona. I used to think my mother was much funnier and more cheerful when we were babies when I read her letters from back then.  Then I realized that was how she wanted to sound in the letters (which she kept carbons of). She had made a conscious decision not to whine in them. They were for her a literary outlet.

Interesting, “persona” was originally a mask worn by actors to show which character they were.

When you like a book, you don’t like the author. You like the persona. A fan of 18^th-centruy poet James Thomson loved that he was a great lover,  great swimmer, and rigorously abstinent –but a friend of Thomson’s said: “he knows not any love but that of the sex; he was perhaps never in cold water in his life; and he indulges himself in all the luxury that comes within his reach.”  (pg. 81 sound on page)

Lack of persona is what makes memoirs not work.

A memoir sprawls and flattens out pretty easily under the weight of an entire person and her thoughts and experiences  being poured into it.  Without a persona, you just write down what happened, and how it felt then and how it feels now, and then you end up wondering why anybody would be interested in reading that. You aren’t all that interested yourself anymore, as you survey the pages.

A persona fixes that. Like an arc, it excludes. When you choose a persona  for the book –and you do choose—you  don’t include  your whole complicated self. That would be boring for all concerned.

Voice is what narrates the story, explains it, comments on it. It’s the glue that ties everything together. you choose to build your memoir on, your setting, your story, all of these elements are pulled  together by the voice. So

If you think about it, in  fiction, finding the right narrator – and therefore the right voice – is the key . Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything is Illuminated , for example, creates an irresistible narrator in a Ukrainian translator whose command of English is hilariously off base: “My legal name is Alexander Perchov.  But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.”

It’s  equally essential in memoir.

These days, with many memoir categories saturated, memoirs on similar subjects are made fresh by a fresh voice. (Hard to be the first on the memoir scene on any subject anymore.) You think you’re the only one who fell out of a plane in the Andes and kept captive by a lost tribe, and go on Amazon and find it happened to six other people.)

Agents and editors are always on the lookout for a great new voice—and there is nothing more exciting than looking at the first page of a manuscript and having that special, one-of-a-kind voice pop right off of the page. Here’s the agent who received a manuscript called Candy Girl by a former stripper named Diablo Cody.

I wasn’t interested based on the subject matter alone. Stripping had been covered before (no pun intended), and I didn’t think the author was likely to add much to an already crowded market. But then there was the voice. After just one paragraph, I was a) completely convinced that stripping was the solution to all of her problems, b) laughing uncontrollably, and c) definitely interested in being along for the entire ride, or at least 250-plus pages.

On the hand, lack of an engaging voice can earn you a review like the one Emma Forrest said about   The Rules of the Tunnel by Ned Zeman:  “Admire as I do his writing, it is the personality that makes the book something of a slog.”

This means sometimes that you have to make a choice between writing for private satisfactions and writing for publication. You  want to write the truth of your experience, of what happened to you.  You want to talk about losing the winery in an acrimonious family lawsuit. The reader doesn’t want to read that. He  wants the funny story of how you became a wine consultant on a cruise ship afterward. A student of mine, a very good writer, wanted to write about an affair she had.  She and the man both busted up their families to be together. I told her it was going to be hard to make her home wrecking narrator sympathetic. Did she have another story she’d like to work on? She didn’t. She said, “This experience is what tempered me, made me grow up, made me able to commit to a relationship, made me the person I have become. This is the story I have to write, whatever ultimately becomes of it.”

This is a good answer. There are many reasons to write your story down, only one of which is the wish for it to be published and read and admired by people you don’t know.

Later on I might make a case that what doesn’t work for the reader also doesn’t work for the writer, but for now let’s agree that what I said about voice and persona is strictly for those who want their memoirs to be published and find a wide audience.

What Is Your Poo Telling You? came to Chronicle Books as a serious examination of–well, you know. In that form, it would have sold 7500 hundred copies.  The lighter treatment of the title they came up with  led to sales of hundreds of thousands of copies. And I always liked the title of the parenting book called, Get Out Of My Life, But First Could You Drive Cheryl And Me To The Mall?

Titles and covers are marketing devices, and thus the publisher’s call. I wanted to call my book on being a grandmother Know When to Hold ‘Em: Playing Your Cards Right as a New Grandmother, but the sales and marketing folks at Chronicle Books didn’t go for it, and they’re the ones who have to get it into the bookstores. It’s now called The Granny Diaries, to coast off the success of The Nanny Diaries, though the two books have nothing else in common (except taking care of kids, I guess).

My friend Janis Newman wanted to call her novel about Mary Todd Lincoln The Madhouse Summer of Mary Todd Lincoln, which I  thought was fabulous, but the publisher wanted titles like Asylum and they finally compromised on Mary.

I found the title for my memoir when I heard that the story of raising a child is “Pick Me Up, Hold Me Close, Put Me Down, Let Me Go. ” That seemed a trifle long, and my friend Donna Levin shortened it for me. (My friend Mark Sloan suggested I call it , Chicken Soup for What’s Left of Your Soul after Your Teenager has Ripped Your Heart out of Your Chest and Stomped on It with her Platform Sneakers. Then when he heard I was working on a new book, he said, “What’s it called? And My Boy Was No Picnic Either?” )

When the book was translated into Japanese, I asked a friend from Tokyo to read the title to me: He hesitated and then translated it for me: How to Appreciate a Very Bad Daughter.

When I told that story to Gerry  Howard, my editor at Broadway Books, he  said that John Steinbeck’s widow told him that she went into a bookstore in Yokahoma and asked if they carried her husband’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath. The clerk went into the back, then came out smiling and said, “Yes, we have Angry Raisins right over here.”

So you are assigned –or assign yourself – to interview Chelsea Handler (four best-selling and very funny books) over lunch.  She is rude and distracted, and treats your questions with disdain. You don’t want to say that, because you know that saying she was rude and distracted makes you sound annoyed and judgmental.  Writer Cathy Horyn, in the New York Times Sunday Style section (may 22,2011)  spends the first four paragraphs highlighting her subject’s intelligence and  how funny her books are (having picked up My Horizontal Life  at the airport).  Then she positions  herself as someone trying not to get on the super-intelligent, somewhat impatient Handler nerves”

“At lunch, Ms. Handler listening to my story [about a fellow passenger’s saying Handler’s writing was ‘raunchy’] as I blurted it out. I knew I was dead. Her confidence, her lack of any need to please or pretend she is interested in what you’re saying, is extraordinary to witness, like a steamroller crushing a trike.”

“I knew I was dead. “ This statement establishes Horyn as the one making mistakes, not getting things right. From here on the interview is a breeze to write, and enjoyable to read,  (later, after another remark, “Handler gave me a look and then thought of something she had to type into her phone”.)  It also paints a portrait of Handler as narcissistic and self-absorbed, which is true to the writer’s experience of her.

Or what if you’ve been reimagining your story as a novel to gain some distance and perspective on your own experiences, and now an agent suggests you change all those little details back and publish it as a memoir? If so, you’re in good company. A surprising number of bestselling memoirs, including Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and, famously, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, started off as novels. On the flip side, writers with lucrative contracts for memoirs have ended up publishing their stories as fiction.

You have to decide. A book must be one thing or the other. Not only will your genre determine how you approach the story, but it will also determine how readers perceive it, how it’s sold and where it’s shelved.

So which is the best choice for your story? Here are 10 factors to consider.

GOOD REASONS TO WRITE IT AS A NOVEL

1. I, uh, made up some things.

A memoir must be essentially nonfiction: That’s your pact with the reader, who is mesmerized by the fact that this really happened to you. The publishing world has been nervous about this ever since Frey shopped A Million Little Pieces as a novel, but then published it as a memoir—with fictional elements still included. Everybody understands that a memoir can employ reconstructed scenes and dialogue to dramatize the story (though it doesn’t hurt to come out and say you’ve done so—in fact, these days most memoirs begin with an Author’s Note stipulating that some names and events have been altered to protect people’s privacy and for the sake of the story). But you can’t change a few hours in an Ohio police station into three months in prison, as Frey did, without breaking that vital pact with your reader. Nor can you downsize your family: When Jamaica Kincaid decided to delete her older brothers from her manuscript Annie John to keep the emotional focus where she wanted it, on a girl and her mother, she cast the story as fiction—even though it was essentially true.

2. I like my family and want them to continue talking to me.

You can change the names and disguise the identities of some people, but obviously you can’t say, “My father, I’ll call him ‘Ned’ …” Family members will be caught in the flare of your flashbulb no matter what you call them. You might find that you are reluctant to risk embarrassing them, but that you’re also unwilling to just delete all that messy but rich material and issue a sanitized and flattering account. Even successful writers have edited themselves to the detriment of their resulting memoirs (as I believe Gail Caldwell did when she wrote Let’s Take the Long Way Home, about her friendship with fellow writer Caroline Knapp, and Anne Dillard did in An American Childhood, which, while aesthetically pleasing, lacks the life and drama that honest portrayals of flawed supporting characters can bestow on a work).

Sometimes the only way you can free yourself to tell the truth is through fiction. That was the choice of Martha Sherrill, who decided to repay a hefty advance to write a memoir about her father because she wasn’t willing to expose a family secret that surfaced during the writing. “My family is important to me,” she says. Her story instead became the basis for a novel, The Ruins of California.

3. I am uncomfortable relying on my memory.

Anna Quindlen, a former New York Times reporter and columnist, opted for fiction over memoir when she began writing books. She had no choice: She found herself checking old weather charts before she could publish the line, “It was very cold the night my mother died.” She worried: Was it very cold, or was that just the trick memory played on a girl who was sick and shivering, at least metaphorically? Quindlen realized that this determination to get every little detail right might hamstring her as a memoirist, a form of writing in which the impressions of memory are part of the package. In her novels, she can arrange the weather as she likes.

Maybe you want to write about the apartment building your mother managed in the ’30s, but you were a little kid at the time. Your parents are not around to interview. Research can fill in some holes, but you will have to do a lot of inventing, and invention equals novel. (The word novel, after all, means “new,” while memoir comes from “to remember.”)

4. The events I’m writing about didn’t happen to me.

By definition, a memoir is a record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation. So you can use all the great details and insider knowledge you can harvest from family accounts to write a gripping story based on your father’s experiences as a prisoner in World War II, but unless you yourself were trapped behind barbed wire, you can’t write it as a memoir; in spite of your best efforts, you’re still imagining what happened. Laura Manivong, author of Escaping the Tiger, based on her husband’s experiences as a Laos refugee, wrote it as a novel both because “the holes in my knowledge and my husband’s memory were too big,” and because it’s not her story.

5. My inspiration for this story is a simple spark from real life, not a complete story arc.

A story requires an arc—a beginning, middle and end—and a main character whose actions drive the plot. In a good memoir, you try a lot of different things to solve your problem. You have setbacks, make mistakes and push on, until you either achieve your driving goal or desire, or don’t, or change your mind about what you really want, or whatever.

I wanted to write about the two years my mother spent in hospice care at her home before she died (of course I took notes while she napped). But in the real version of my story, I wasn’t an action hero. My mother was going to die. I was one of her daughters, reacting to events, but not initiating them the way a good protagonist should. I discovered it would not have made an exciting book. But in a fictionalized account, I could keep all the good stuff while inventing a more dramatic version of myself—maybe a character whose run for state senate is threatened by her absences and her mother’s deathbed revelations (“I should tell you, I set that fire myself …”).

Similarly, a student of mine is struggling to write about how her troubles at the hands of an abusive adopted brother ended when he died in a car crash. While that’s a true story with a lot of event, in real life the narrator’s change came about from a change in her circumstances, not from within. To write a more engaging story with a compelling protagonist, a novel would be a better form in which to explore the story that inspired her.

GOOD REASONS TO MAKE IT A MEMOIR

6. Other people will strongly identify with my story, and I want to be able to share the truth of what happened.

You may want to talk to groups, go on talk shows, and connect with readers who are also mothers, or cancer survivors, or men who graduated from medical school after the age of 50. If your true story relates to a social issue you’re passionate about—perhaps you have an autistic child, or are adopted, or were tossed out of the Air Force for being gay—it makes sense to write it as a memoir.

7. I’m unwilling to work around inconvenient or stranger-than-fiction facts just because a novel demands a shapely plot.

Beth Kephart, author of the memoir Still Love in Strange Places, has said, “When you draw from real life for the purposes of fiction, you have to be willing to discard details that have mattered deeply, to blur edges of the truth, to shape newly.” Still Love in Strange Places began as a novel about El Salvador and became, through the course of 15 years of writing and rewriting, a strictly personal account. “… The risk of imagining seemed too great, the possibility of getting some part of it wrong too extreme,” Kephart explained. “So I started over, and simply wrote the truth.”

Another thing to consider is that a novel must create a believable world, one in which a bizarre event can look made up or over-the-top. Memoir allows you to tell the stories that would seem too convenient, or sentimental, or jarring in a novel. By its very nature memoir says, “This can happen. This did happen.” Tom Grimes, author of the memoir Mentor, says that if he’d included a story like that of his sister’s suicide attempt in a novel, “it may have seemed heavy-handed.” But in his memoir, readers were moved by the passage. He says, “I think that’s because they’re reacting to something true.”

8. I find the unlimited choices of fiction overwhelming.

You may be happier with the more confining environment of nonfiction, which doesn’t allow you to make Dad an astronaut instead of an accountant.

I know I am. I tried to fictionalize the story of my childhood, but found myself floundering amid too many choices: I’ll begin it in 1941, when my father deserts in Hawaii. No! When my mother flops as a showgirl in Las Vegas and my dad meets her on a San Francisco beach. No—I’ll write it from my mother’s point of view. … I lack the confidence a novelist needs to have in her inventions. There’s nothing wrong with sticking with the facts, if that’s where you’re most comfortable.

9. I have a quirky, appealing voice.

Voice is probably the most important element in memoir today, when so many subjects have already been written about. Having a strong voice means adopting a more heightened version of yourself: more emotional, more dramatic, more vulnerable, maybe funnier or more ironic. Think of Mary McCarthy, who’s written many novels but whose nonfiction account, Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood, allowed her to unleash her acerbic personality. (In that memoir, she and her siblings, “Poor Roy’s children, as commiseration damply styled us,” were forced to live with their awful grandmother.) McCarthy herself says that such a voice can be lost in fiction: “The technical difficulties are so great, in projecting yourself, in feigning an alien consciousness.”

Likewise, a brilliant novelist may be uncomfortable writing a firsthand account of something that happened in real life: I couldn’t help but notice that Joyce Carol Oates, an indefatigable writer of fiction, seems less certain in her recent memoir, A Widow’s Story, in which she is overly emotional and also neglects to mention that she happily remarried in the middle of recovering from her husband’s death.

10. I am writing the story to explore questions about what happened.

You have to write your story, if only to get rid of it, because until you do, everything you write will lead back to the winery, or to your father’s departure, or to that strange time in Spain. You want to get to the bottom of things, find the hidden patterns, achieve insight into your own behavior and that of others. If you feel compelled in these ways, then you must set down the unvarnished truth as you remember it. “The fictional construct rarely takes you deeper into the material that you want to explore,” writes David Shields, who began his long writing career in fiction and has since turned his focus to memoir. “Instead, it takes you … into the technology of narrative, of plot, of place, of scene, of characters. In most novels I read, the narrative completely overwhelms whatever it was the writer supposedly set out to explore in the first place.”

If your imagination has always led you, if fanciful events creep into your retellings even when you try to stick to the facts, you might be a natural novelist, one prone to drawing on his own experience for inspiration, but nothing more. If, however, your story has a strong voice and can survive the scrutiny of nonfiction, it wants to be a memoir. You might even try writing a chapter of the story you’re thinking of as a piece of short fiction or, alternatively, as a personal essay—that’s a good way to test your style, your comfort zone and even your subject matter before making a big commitment.

Either way, of course, whether you’re creating a better world from your imagination or re-creating one that you lived in, if you write it well enough, readers will be too enthralled and moved to care much whether it comes from real life or not.

http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/10-ways-to-tell-if-your-story-should-be-a-memoir-or-a-novel