I’m in the final stages of working on a short story for this wonderful anthology called Anonymous Sex that Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan are editing. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked on fiction, and the revision and editing process for this story has been wonderful because it’s getting me back in touch with the specific intricacies of this medium.
One of the big adjustments I’ve had to make has been getting used to treating fact as malleable again, after years of nonfiction where established facts were stable and didn’t change in the process of working on a piece. In fiction, facts can always be torn down and rebuilt, their stability only scaffolded by a writer’s investment and how they relate to the rest of the story. It’s taken me a long time to let go of settings I’ve established when they don’t serve me anymore, or traits I’ve given to a character that turn out not to really make sense in the larger scheme of what I’m trying to accomplish.
The malleability of fiction may make it feel more difficult and less efficient, but there’s also a lot of pleasure in being able to remake or manipulate a fact or condition when it ends up not being exactly the right fit, something that is much harder to do in nonfiction.
So if you’re a nonfiction writer who’s making a foray into fiction, this is a key adjustment that would be important to make. In fiction, there is no established fact that can’t be erased and remade. This becomes very important in revision when you might wind up thinking something can’t happen because you’ve already put forth specific conditions. Just remember that those conditions can change, often drastically.
This is my way of introducing the issues that we will tackle in our second spring workshop, “From Memoir to Fiction: Writing Across Mediums” with Emma Eisenberg, fiction writer and author of the amazing reported memoir The Third Rainbow Girl, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 2020. Emma has been doing this fiction / nonfiction dance for a lot longer than me, so I look forward to probing her wonderful brain for ideas on how to better bridge it. Click here for more info and to register!
~M.