Memoirs As Fiction (article) by R. J. Brown on AuthorsDen

Everyone's heard about memoirs which included stories or facts that didn't actually happen in the authors' lives, or were exaggerated. Oprah Winfrey had the wool pulled over her eyes twice, & when I ran my book review site, RebeccasReads.com, I got hoodwinked too. The trouble was this author wasn't who or what he said he was. His prestigious literary agent got him a three book contract with a Top Gun publishing house. He even won an award specific to his avowed heritage, which garnered him cash & cachet. I enjoyed his writing: it was passionate, unusual & informative. Seduced by his provenance: top-notch agent & publisher, I reviewed his books; even interviewed him, glad to give a new writer a boost so he could rise above the flood of ghost-written ho-hum memoirs. A year or so later, I was contacted by a reporter from one of the bigger newspapers & a college professor with impeccable & documented credentials, who warned me they were about to "out" this author as a fake cuz his books were entirely figments of his imagination rife with other writers' stories & phrases. The fallout from his deception was that his literary agent lost face & her agency, the publishing house a lot of money, & him any credibility. Had he presented his stories as novels, he'd have had a career for life, until the plagiarism caught up with him. What's Legal? The publishing industry has strict guidelines for this genre: A memoir must contain only true & factual representations of who you are, where you came from & what you lived through. Everything else is fiction. That the industry & reading public insist there's a difference derives from those first stories we told around cave fires, under desert stars. What we trust & believe to be real versus what we think is made up. These Big Thoughts have changed every culture on the face of this earth from the beginning of language, religion & literacy, & is still doing so. The Moral Is When writing your life stories, present them either as a creative non-fiction memoir... or as a novel. If a memoir: stick to what you really remember, what really happened & can be proven. If a novel: embellish away! My Vietnam Veteran husband, D. H. Brown of HONOR DUE & HONOR DEFENDED, has done this at the suggestion of his therapists, & has gained some healing & comfort cuz it's been an effective way to exorcise the ghosts, while spinning thrilling yarns. Does that make his novels less engaging? Not at all! Writing his memories in fictional form with his hero doing the telling, allows him to look at his life adventures through a wider prism while creating tales that everyone who's read them, says helped with their own wounds. My Own Memoir I've been slogging away at it, re-reading 40 years of journals. There are some memories I'd really rather not revisit, however, a while back a voice in my brain started telling a story & I kept typing. For the entire winter! When spring came, I had the makings of my first cozy mystery with a heroine who'd lived through much of what I had. After I sent the rough draft out to my Reading Group, all except one wrote back saying how much they enjoyed it & how neat to see bits & pieces of my life in there. "Oh, and by the way, did you know you've got two books in one?" It was very long! So I rewrote a leaner version & now The Dead Husband: A Sally Sees Cozy Mystery is available at Internet booksellers. So, don't discount the telling of your life stories as something other than a memoir because a good story in any genre is still a good story, & the feel of your very own book in your hands is a satisfying thrill.
Web Site	The Books of R. J. Brown
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