Folks aren’t always sure of the difference between a memoir and a novel. After all, they’re both stories about people. And they share a lot of the same ways of telling a story. For instance, both a memoir and a novel have characters, action, dialogue, and description. But they are based on two very different premises. A memoir is nonfiction. It’s a true story, told by the person who lived it. A novel is fiction, a made-up story. Its characters and events are (usually) entirely invented. So, should you write a memoir, or a novel?
The answer may not be as clear-cut as you might imagine!
The Difference Between a Memoir and a Novel
What Is a Memoir?
Memoir belongs to a category called narrative nonfiction. General nonfiction (or non-narrative nonfiction), like how-to books or self-help books, present information. By contrast, narrative nonfiction is built like a story, with scenes, tension, and character development. So, a memoir isn’t just true. It’s true, it’s book length, and it’s got an engaging narrative arc.
For instance, Paula McLain’s Like Family is a true account of McLain and her sisters growing up in foster homes. In it, she uses her real name and real memories to convey what happened to her and her siblings during those years. But it reads like a story, not like an exposé of the foster system.
What Is a Novel?
A novel is a book-length, made-up story. Its characters and events are invented (for the most part; historical fiction blurs that line a bit). It doesn’t have to come from your life at all. It can, but nothing requires it. In fact, most novels are completely fabricated. Paula McLain also wrote A Ticket to Ride. This entirely invented coming-of-age story about a teenage girl and her cousin has no basis in McLain’s own history.
Memoir or a Novel? Three Paths for Writing About Your Life
If you want to write about your own life, you actually have three options, not two.
1. Write a memoir.
You tell your true story, using your own name, bound to what actually happened. This means being accountable to your memory, to the facts you can verify, and often to the people who were there with you. McLain’s Like Family is this path — nothing invented, nothing softened for the story’s sake.
2. Write a novel based on your life.
You can use your own experience as raw material, then let yourself invent freely. Paula McLain did this with her novel When the Stars Go Dark. Stars is a novel about a missing-persons detective, Anna Hart. While Hart is entirely McLain’s invention, McLain has said she poured her own foster-care history and trauma into Anna. It’s fiction, shelved and read as fiction, but it emerged from something true.
3. Fictionalize your memoir.
This is the middle ground. You can stay close to the true story, but where a gap in your memory calls for it, you can reshape scenes and even combine people—as long as you tell readers you’ve done it! Augusten Burroughs took this approach in Dry, which is shelved as memoir. Dry opens with Burroughs’s author’s note, which explains that he’d changed names, combined some characters, and compressed or recreated scenes, to convey the narrative effect he wanted.
So, Should You Write a Memoir or a Novel?
I wrote an entire post about the levels of invention available to memoir writers. You can read it here: “When to Fictionalize Your Memoir.” Basically, if you feel confident about the factual aspects of your story, writing a straight memoir might be a good choice for you. On the other hand, if you want to invent characters and/or situations while tracking significant parts of your experience closely, a novel based on your life gives you the freedom to do exactly that. If you want to tell your story to the best of your memory, though, but your memory has significant gaps, fictionalizing your memoir might be a perfect middle road.
None of these paths is more legitimate than the others. The only real question is which one lets you tell the story you actually need to tell.
If you have questions about whether you should write a memoir or a novel—or any other aspects of the writing process—I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.