 Drama: November 05, 2025 Issue [#13419] |
This week: Memoir-Inspired Dramatic Fiction Edited by: Joy  
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“Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.”
Anne Rivers Siddons, Fault Lines
“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God
“The next thing I knew, I was falling. I dreamed I was being thrown into an open grave, but jerked awake and landed on a bed.”
Eric Jerome Dickey, Finding Gideon
“Sometimes, remembering hurts too much.”
Jess Rothenberg, The Catastrophic History of You and Me
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about memoir-inspired fiction.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Why resort to drama when telling a personal real-life occurrence, you might ask. And that would be a very good question, too. In my case, I kept a memoir for a long time. Then, my life became too busy and I stopped. To this day, I regret it.
Why pick up stories from our own lives when we can invent them, you might ask again. True, but memoir-based fiction, feels more factual, and it has the positives of a literary story as a big plus.
I'd say, in other words, this is because memoir-inspired dramatic fiction sits between autobiography and imaginative storytelling. It is, in fact, a hybrid form. It uses the emotional truth, scenes, and characters from a writer’s own life, but such a story is not an actual memoir. It is much better, deeper, and in general, more interesting, since this form reshapes the memoir into a crafted fiction piece.
"Why bother?" can be a good question, here. My answer is, this hybrid form allows us writers to explore the truths hiding behind the strict nonfiction, the memoir. It allows us to feel free to exaggerate details, condense timelines, merge people into composite characters, or reimagine events for a greater effect. The trick is to keep our distance and treat ourselves as a character, if the original memoir is ours.
As writers, we know that a totally factual retelling of something doesn't always capture the internal reality of an experience; however, dramatization can. Also, we do it to protect privacy by reshaping personal material. In addition, turning something personal into something relatable helps the readers to see themselves in the story. Better yet, we can reimagine past events and neglected paths by using the "what if" question.
That said, another good question could be ,"Which version of the truth does the writing reveal best as the heart of an experience?" I would say the fictional truth. This way, even though the story is highly personal, we can treat it like fiction. We can build scenes with clear stakes and conflict, good dialogue, sensory details, and good pacing. Our aim should be both the internal and external change, and we can end it with an insight or emotional clarity.
For example, Jack Kerouac's On the Road is a travel story based on Kerouac's own travel journals, but he has reshaped them into existential and almost mythic story about meaning and freedom.
Then, one of my favorites, Ocean Vuong's On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is written as a letter from a son to his mother. As well as being about the author's own upbringing as a Vietnamese-American, it is a memoir. Also, it is good fiction where craft is concerned.
Plus, Go Tell It on the Mountain tells of James Baldwin's own dramatized version of his youth, family conflicts, and his spiritual awakening.
When we come down to it, there is a fine line between reality and authenticity vs. artistry and craft. In short, memoir tells what happened; memoir-inspired fiction reveals what it felt like to live through it.
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Let me know or send a link to me if you have written anything memoir-inspired.
Here is my memoir-inspired short-piece:
The night before I left, our house seemed to breathe heavier than usual, its old walls sighing with the weight of my packed boxes and unspoken words. My mother’s hands trembled around a chipped teacup, the one with faded violets. She said nothing about the move. She only asked if I’d fed the cat, as though feeding a cat could steady everything. I watched the light flicker through the lace curtains and thought, absurdly, that even the dust was afraid to settle.
Years later, she would tell people I had moved out at that time because I wanted to live closer to the University, but that wasn’t the only truth. I left because the silence between us had grown too thick for me to live inside that house.
Until next time! 
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 This Issue's Tip: Writing a memoir-based story, the writer’s task is to translate a truly lived experience into an emotional architecture. It is to create something that feels true, even when it isn’t exactly so. This way, we writers are free to take liberties just the way we want.
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Feedback for "Do Your Stories Haunt?"
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Quick-Quill 
I just watched True Haunting on Netflix. WOW what great stories. I also rewatched Ed and Lorraine Warren's Shock Doc Documentary. I love this kind of stuff.
Good stuff. I'd say, although it has been ages I watched anything like that. Maybe this Halloween!
Thanks for sharing.
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