Remember all that ruckus about A Million Little Pieces? The author said it was a memoir so readers assumed it had to be true, then it came out that he made some of it up and a great many people felt horribly betrayed? What you may not know is that the author and his agent had first tried to market the book – or at least the concept – as a novel. And in an article in the AR&E newsletter, Talking Agents, I said that was a normal discussion for an agent and writer to have – should I do this as a novel (which, remember, is always fiction – you are far too intelligent to use that horrible tautology fictional novel) or as a biography or what? Sometimes the answer is make it a memoir. Usually you cover yourself with an author’s foreword in which you speak to the things you maybe fudged or names you changed, etc. The author of Little Pieces didn’t do that, leaving everyone with a very bad taste in their mouths. Particularly since the book sold a gazillion copies and made millions. But his agent dumped him, his next book contract was cancelled, and if we hear from him again it will be something like If I Did It Here’s How I Would Have, etc. With probably the same result. (And I don’t know what happened to the millions earned from A Million Little Pieces. Though I heard that OJ was supposed to give back whatever part of the advance he’d been paid so far.)
All this came to mind because I saw in this morning’s Washington Post that Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) has written about a Sudanese refugee whose story he very much wanted to tell. As the Post explains it, one of “thousands of young refugees from the civil war in southern Sudan, which broke out in the mid-1980s and continued until peace was finally negotiated in 2005.” Some of whom now live in various parts of the US, as does the young man in Eggers’s tale.
Though the subject of his story was cooperating with him, Eggers was convinced he could not write this book without “fictionalizing” some elements: making up conversations he could not have heard and had to imagine, conflating some time lines, describing things that were happening outside the point of view of the young man about whom he was writing… So he did it as a novel, explained what he was doing in the requisite foreword, and the critics can make of it what they will. As can the much more important reading public.
This story is, if you will, the mirror image of the Little Pieces debacle. It is facts employed to serve fiction, and thereby arrive at a higher and much more real explanation of truth.
In my view, that’s what all fiction is supposed to be. And historical novels more than the rest of fiction. Such efforts are not “distortions” of history as those who denigrate the genre claim. They are certainly not honeyed versions of history. No novelist worth her typing skills would ignore the big dramatic confrontations in favor of some sort of fluff. That’s the sort of thing that gets you comments from editors and agents such as: You’re allowing all the drama to happen off the page… You never actually engage the reader in the conflict… Etc. (And it’s probably legitimate in historical romance, another genre entirely and not what’s under discussion here.)
A good historical novel is an exciting story told against the background of a period of time in the past. You can play with that formula in many different ways – indeed that’s what the creative imagination is supposed to do – but at base it is what it is and won’t change. In the course of telling the story of your characters and their love and hate and greed and heroism – all the stuff that makes up all our lives – and playing out the plot threads you’ve established, you also illuminate the big and small truths of another era. And maybe surprise some folks. The huge part slavery played in the history of New York for one big thing. The fact that the street grid – as in 42nd and Broadway – was in place in Manhattan by 1809, for one of the smaller.
Finally note the phrase plot threads above. If you’re reading this blog because you’re a budding novelist writing in any genre, put them on a big sign above your computer. Above the one that reminds you that all writing is rewriting. (Not me, G. B. Shaw.) YOU HAVE TO HAVE A PLOT. A novel may not be a memoir. But no matter how critically important the characters, it is definitely not a biography.