How to Fictionalize Your Memoirs

Your personal stories are fertile ground for fictional stories. Many people complain that they can’t think of a storyline to use to write a novel, but our own lives offer a plethora of characters, scenes and plots that are better than our imaginations! If you want to try your hand at writing a novel, look to your memoirs to develop an outline and see what happens!

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Change the names of the people in your memoirs. Shocking? Give it a try! Did you always think Aunt Sally really should have been named Ramona? Here is your chance to give good old Aunt Sally an entirely new identity.
2. Make male characters female and female characters male. Take every person in your memoir and change his or her gender. Watch what happens. The results will be very interesting.
3. Change the setting. If your memoirs are set in New York. then pick up all those characters and plunk them down on an island in the Caribbean. You can turn them into natives of the area or you can leave them as New Yorkers stranded on one of the islands.
4. Fast forward or rewind. Change the time period in your fictionalized memoirs. Take your characters on a wild ride to the future or transport them back to medieval times. It is interesting how the characters you know and love behave in a different time period.
5. Alter facts. Did Grandma die before you were old enough to remember her. Change it. Make her alive and present throughout your childhood. What would have been different if that had happened? I had a memoir author once write about losing his father before his birth and he commented that he really wished he would have known his dad. I told him to write it – bring dad back to life. This man ended up writing a 300 page novel about his dad and the life he didn’t get to live.

Tips & Warnings

• Consider using different points of view.