Memoirs are not stories

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Since putting a book of SF/thriller short stories together a year ago I have been running a reset. Doing some hard thinking about writing, and carefully reading people like Irène Némirovsky (Suite Française, All Our Worldly Goods) and John Fowles (The Magus, The Collector). Authors who write character-driven fiction.

Fay Weldon once wrote indignantly that authors do not write about their own lives or those of people they know, they make characters up from their imaginations. But she was being disingenuous: how many classics are revealed to be thinly-disguised autobiography, with 'just the names changed'?

Where she is right is that memoirs are not stories. Memoirs are life in all its plotlessness, banality and broader inconsequentiality. Stories are how we would like reality to be: clear characters, an arc to a conclusion. In stories there is closure and satisfaction; in our memories of life - not so much.

I have some new stories in preparation.