Anger is the signal, more than your subject, the legal risk or how famous anybody is.
A man sits down to write about the twenty years he gave a company and the six months they took to remove him.
He has the emails. He can tell you what the general counsel said in the room, what the date was, what everyone did with their hands. And every chapter is addressed to four people who will never read it.
That’s when I say: let’s make it a novel. Change the names, move the industry, shift the circumstances. You keep the story and you lose the trial.
Why does anger break a memoir?
Because it narrows your book to an argument, and an argument has one audience.
Watch what it does to the prose. Every scene builds toward the moment somebody was unfair. Characters who aren’t involved in the grievance thin out into furniture. The author, who in life is funny and observant, becomes a man presenting evidence. And the reader, who has never met any of these people, is asked to care about a verdict in a case they weren’t called for.
Angry books also lie by omission, and not on purpose. The author leaves out the quarter where he was difficult to work with, because it complicates the case. Readers feel the hole even when they can’t name it, and once they suspect the author is handling them, nothing in the book persuades them. I’ve written about who shouldn’t write a revenge memoir, and the answer there is most people. This piece covers what to do instead of abandoning the material, because the material is often good.
What does changing the names really do?
Three things happen, and only one of them is legal.
It removes the identifiable person. Defamation needs somebody identifiable. Move the industry, change the city, alter the timeline, combine two people into one and split a third into two, and the general counsel who removed you stops being a person and becomes a character. Do it properly instead of swapping surnames, since a thinly disguised portrait in your industry is identifiable to everyone who matters, and a disclaimer page doesn’t fix that.
It frees you from what happened. Authors don’t expect it. In a memoir, you’re bound to the record. The confrontation happened on a Tuesday over email, so it’s a Tuesday and it’s email, and email is bad drama. In fiction you can put the two of them in an elevator. The scene becomes what it was emotionally instead of what it was procedurally, and readers get the truth of it instead of the transcript.
It moves the author off the stand. Once he’s writing a character instead of defending himself, something loosens. He can give the antagonist a reason and let the protagonist be wrong somewhere. I’ve watched clients invent a scene where the rival is decent for a page and then realize, out loud, that the real man was decent sometimes too.
When does fiction fail as a solution?
Three cases, and you should know them before you commit.
The author only wants out of first person. Some clients aren’t angry, they’re uncomfortable being the subject. They think third person will hide them. It won’t, because fiction is a different craft with its own demands. A novel needs a plot that goes somewhere, characters who want things, scenes built to move the story. A memoir can be a life told straight. A novel has to be constructed. Shifting to fiction to avoid discomfort means taking on a much harder job for no benefit.
The life is already public. If you ran a company people have heard of, testified somewhere, or appear in news coverage, fictionalizing doesn’t disguise anything. Every reader in your industry maps it in two chapters, and now you’ve published the accusation and lost the defense of saying it was true. That’s worse than the memoir.
I tell clients in that position to forget the disguise. A famous employer in a thin costume carries all the risk of naming names, and the book still doesn’t get to say what the author meant.
The author wants the accusation to land. Sometimes what a client wants is for readers to know exactly who it was. That’s a legitimate desire, and fiction can’t serve it. Then we talk about the memoir, the legal review, and what it will cost. I covered that in writing about living people without getting sued.
Four questions to settle which form you are writing
Four questions I work through with clients, and you can run them yourself.
Who is this for? If your answer names specific people, that’s the anger talking and fiction is worth considering. If it’s for your children, or for people in the situation you were in, memoir is the right form.
What breaks if the names change? Sometimes nothing. Sometimes everything, because the point is that this happened to a real person at a real company. If nothing breaks, you had a novel.
Can you make the antagonist sympathetic for one scene? If the thought is intolerable, you’re not ready to write either version. Come back in a year. I mean that kindly; the material will still be there and you’ll be a better writer of it.
What would you lose by waiting? Usually nothing except the urge, and the urge is the least reliable part of the project. Books written in the first year after something happens tend to get rewritten in the third.
A writer takes real events, real people and a real crime, and shapes them into something with the structure of a novel. The film is about what that costs, both to the book and to the people inside it. That’s the question anyone fictionalizing their own life should think about first.
What usually happens next
Here’s the outcome I’ve seen several times and no longer find surprising.
We agree on fiction. The author starts building the novel, inventing a company, a city, a different cast. He spends months with material he thought he knew.
Then he tells me the book is about the fifteen years before it, the people he built something with, the thing he was proud of before it ended badly. The grievance that generated the project has become one chapter near the end, and it’s better written than it would have been, because by the time he got there he wasn’t angry any longer.
That’s the real argument for this approach. Fiction buys you distance from the exposure, and distance is also what the writing needed.
A note on what you owe readers
One caveat, because I get asked.
If you fictionalize, it’s a novel, so publish it as one. Don’t market it as a true story with the names changed, don’t hint in interviews, and don’t put a note in the front matter winking at the reader. I have no patience for that wink, because it hands the people you wrote about everything they need: all the exposure of the memoir with none of the protection.
Some of the best novels ever written come from their authors’ lives and are published as fiction without apology. That’s the tradition you’re joining. It’s a respectable one, and it asks you to commit.
If you’re still working out which form your book is, memoir, autobiography and biography covers the distinctions, and memoir formats covers the structures. If you want somebody to help you decide before you write two hundred pages of the wrong one, that’s what my ghostwriting service is for.
