Writing Fiction Autobiographically

The challenge is to transfer autobiographical facts to the fictional page. This self-portrait writing method, autofiction for short, uses fictional devices and embellishments to reach a more nuanced emotional truth. The memoirist cannot elaborate like the autofiction writer because these non-factual additions are not in their factual toolkit.

Events in my past can be so compelling that shaping them into fictional form has become my passion. Another way to look at this process is to say that, through memory, the unconscious rises to a higher level of self-awareness.

Nowhere in all of literature is the experience of the author recalled more expansively than in the writings of Marcel Proust “Remembrance of Things Past”, also known as “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” In Search of Lost Time. His “Madeleine” episode depicts the memory process of writing fiction as a model for creativity.

In Paris in 1909, Proust, returning home late one night, asked his cook to bring him a cup of tea with a madeleine, a small sponge cake shaped like a shell. The taste and smell of the madeleine dipped into a cup of lime-flavored tea unloosened for him a flood of memory, recalling him to boyhood visits with his grandfather, who in the 1880s was in the habit of giving this treat to his grandson in his bedroom on summer mornings.

The simultaneous existence in the past and present, evoked by what Proust called “privileged moments” of memory, gave him a glimpse of the essence common to both. The image recalled or felt ushered in a reality independent of time. A world beyond literal truth opened to him, triggered by a cup of tea and a cookie.

American short story writer Katherine Ann Porter used memory in writing fiction. Her method, as she declared, is to “write from memory” and, in many circumstances, features her past self as a principal character. The most straightforward detail for her could break open the floodgates of memory. Her childhood in the South, amid the realities of post-Civil War, was often painful to recall, and she would altogether forget it, put it aside, until some image would break open a Proustian flow of memory. It was in this manner that Katherine Ann Porter wrote.

For example, she had once read somewhere about the turning of particular slats of a window, blinds only known in that part of Texas where she grew up. The image unleashed childhood for her, and she was stung by the memory. She wrote about that incident, saying, “You may not believe that childhood is a terrible thing. Wait ‘til it reaches you in a flash.”

The recollections of the stages of my life enriched by decades of experience and hindsight offer a meaning that I could not appreciate when the past incident occurred. The truth hidden in that experience is revealed anew in the present memory of it.

The idea that memories from the past are often painful is essential to my writing. It is not only the image apprehended “in a flash” that I wish to develop in my stories but also the emotional truth attached to it. When imagery merges with a sad or conflicting emotion evoked by memory, it becomes a symbol, the way a clenched fist signifies aggression, for example. Or rubbing your hands together may indicate excitement.

T.S. Eliot uses the term “objective correlative” to mean finding a set of objects, a situation, or a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion. For Proust and Katherine Ann Porter, it was not a matter of finding the objects. Objects found them “in a flash” in the rich and sometimes painful “privileged moments” of memory.

In the writing of my story called “Putting Her Away,” a specific sound had taken hold of me, and I recalled a past incident in my life “in a flash” when I heard it. The sound was of a woman speaking without teeth. Her toothless “S’s” sounded like a child learning to whistle, and her lips looked like melted rubber bands. The sound and lips were so evocative that I was brought back instantly to a time with my mother—a memory so forceful that I even sensed a specific odor in the air that related to the painful experience I had witnessing mom battle her mental demons in the 1960s in Chicago. It was that strange but remarkable image that launched me to write “Putting Her Away.”

“All serious work in fiction is autobiographical,” says Thomas Wolf. It is true. But, I have to confess, there’s anxiety attached to this process. The material found in the autobiography is raw. It can be an embarrassing show to present to the public, but it is what the reader expects. Using first person “I” instead of third person “she” makes a world of difference. There are times in writing autofiction when I feel like a mud wrestler sloshing clumsily around in the dirt of my past. Other times, I feel like a ballerina transforming physical movement into life’s artful dance.

Carrying out this structure in short story form is another challenge, yet the short story is a genre most like the lyric poem and lends itself to the development of self-portraiture and the uses of memory. I must leave out most of what the novelist narrates chapter after chapter. The short story exists on its own. Chapters in a novel link together and connect by design.

My job entails sifting out the good and letting the rest scatter to the wind. The theme emerges only after the short story is pared down and compressed into a unified whole, concise enough to be read in one sitting—the quality of the writing outweighs the quantity.

Often, a story based on tragedy involves complex and uncommon relationships, unrequited love, dysfunctional family life, or severe physical or psychological abuse. The autobiographical fiction writer has to have lived it to write it—her motivation is to write to get it right—to relive the pains of the past and come through to the healing powers of now. Overcoming tragedy makes a well-written story not only compelling to the reader but healing. People can be in therapy for years because they are psychologically “stuck” and are unable to relate to the past events in their lives.

I read fiction not to escape from reality but to focus on it. In the end, autobiography comes full circle. I hope when my life diminishes to a few things I’m capable of doing, that one will be to reread a fine poem or short story that enlarges my capacity to love and honor other lives.

And if my eyes become so bad that I can no longer read, I hope that my memory of privileged moments will call me back to perhaps one of my own stories that helped to change me in some critical way.

I have several more stories to finish, marking the stages of my life before the collection is edited and ready for publication. It may take years, but who’s counting?

Finally, my motivation in writing an essay on autofiction is to get people thinking about writing personal stories more nuanced through memory and fictional devices. And when objects or things observed usher in a flow of memory like Proust’s Madeleine or Katherine Ann Porter’s blinds or my seeing a toothless woman, the past incident takes on new meaning outside of time. Focusing on the memory in the present is like time traveling. Now that’s magic.