Why Your Memoir Characters Might Not Be Interesting!
In fiction, the people who appear on your pages and play a role in the story you are narrating are called characters.
As a memoirist, you must take character development as seriously as a fiction writer does.
As with fiction so too with memoir
Vivid character development is as crucial in memoir writing as in fiction writing.
In fiction, characters must be developed into rounded figures that the reader will sympathize with and relate to. (No stick figures allowed!) This calls for details and exactness in depiction as well as for consistency in presentation.
The same is true of the people who appear in your memoir and play a role in your stories: your family, friends and colleagues are your characters.
How you portray your characters on the page, not how flamboyant or dramatic your people were in life, will make your story “interesting.” Without well-developed characters, how can you be surprised your memoir falls “flat!”
“But, I can fictionalize, can’t I?”
This call to take your character development to the next level does not provide you with a license for fictionalizing in your storytelling!
What is allowed in fiction and what is allowed in a memoir varies in many instances. For instance, take dialog. A fiction writer can write a detailed dialog but a memoir writer cannot “remember” in too exact a detail. Really: who can remember a conversation that occurred 40 years ago? The tone and the gist of the dialog, yes, but exact wording adding up to a 75-word quote? No.
An obvious solution? Use indirect dialog.
Not a memoir!
Memoirs that take liberties in character development are not memoirs but are autobiographical fiction. Calling autobiographical fiction “memoir” is like calling lobbing the ball over a lowered net “playing tennis.”
In conclusion
The posts below will help you to develop more vivid characters out of the people in your life.
For anyone interested in more than the character development posts below provide, we offer a distance-learning tutorial Develop Vivid Characters. It is an extract from our Write Your First Memoir Draft Program.
[To watch a video on developing characters in memoir, click here.]
Ouch! Your memoir characters are not as interesting as they should be! And, fortunately, you can easily change that.
Why Your Memoir Characters Might Not Be Interesting! In fiction, the people who appear on your pages and play a role in the story you are narrating are called characters. As a memoirist, you must take memoir characters as seriously as a fiction writer does. As with fiction characters so too with memoir characters Vivid […]
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