Traveling from Memoir to Novel: This Time the Narrator isn’t Me

Five years ago I moved to China with my husband, two young boys and a mess of a book manuscript that’s recently become my forthcoming novel. Today the book is called Paris Was the Place, and it will come out with Knopf next July. But back in China I think it was titled The Shape of a Boy. I can’t be sure because it changed titles so many times during its short life. It also changed verb tense and point of view (from first person to third and back to first) and plot structure—just to name a few.

I began working on another draft of the novel as soon as we moved into our Beijing high rise. But it was like trying to write fiction in outer space. The novel is set in central Paris in the late 1980’s, which came to feel about as far away from downtown Beijing as the moon. It was difficult for me to get any narrative footing while I wrote in China. I ended up arriving at a discursive first-person voice that I thought would solve all the novel’s problems. But what this meant was a book that moved back and forth in time far too quickly, with chapters that sat like unanchored prose poems.

Then something great happened to my novel while I was in China: I wrote a memoir. The memoir was about what it meant to live on the far side of the world, grappling with Mandarin and a stealth case of breast cancer. My novel got pushed far over to the side, or rather to the bottom drawer of my China desk, where it sat for the next two years.

What my memoir kindly did was teach me how to write story. Simple, chronological, authentic story. It also taught me how to stay in the scenes longer and to wait it out until all the good stuff—the tension between characters and the nuance and the compassion—rose to the top. Truth be told, my memoir sort of wrote itself—I certainly worked hard at it, but the material for the book offered itself to me and I knew it cold: the mouth-watering Beijing dumpling houses, the ancient Buddhist Temples and the zooey Beijing surgery for a breast cancer I didn’t believe I had.

I learned how to put myself into my memoir and to write with an intimate voice, as if I was talking to a very close friend. I finished it and published it, while my novel waited in the desk drawer patiently. When I finally turned to the novel, it had my full attention. By then I understood that much of good writing is about conflict. So where was the conflict in my novel? And why was its chronology a mess? I rewrote the book again and threw out a whole lot of stuff—trying to create the intimate voice that I’d been able to arrive at in my memoir.

But this time the narrator was not me. Who was she? Her name was Willie Pears and I could see her in my mind on a train in France. I could watch her get on a plane in Paris and fly to Delhi. But I couldn’t fully get inside her head. Getting to know her took time. My editor likened it to breaking down an emotional wall.

Memoir had proved itself to be a clean marriage of form and content for me. But there was such an abundance of choice in writing the novel that it was heady. I had to let the characters loose on their own. I had to trust them and trust that the novel would find its own emotional breakthroughs. I got myself to the chair at my desk and generated material. But life kept interrupting, especially in the form of those two young boys of mine. I gained on Willie Pears in increments. She asked me to be more open to her than I’d ever been to any character—including myself. Then she began to live on the edges of my imagination—when I went to bed, when I woke in the middle of night, while I walked the boys to school.

The emotional wall that my editor had been trying to get me to scale finally came down. I understood Willie’s motivations, even if I didn’t always agree with her. And this is how I gave myself over to my novel. Willie Pears isn’t me. She didn’t hike in the Tibetan Plateau in Yunnan Province or teach writing workshops to Chinese nationals who are still nostalgic for Mao. She’s thirty years old, fierce about Pablo Neruda poems, and teaches refugee girls at an asylum center in Paris’s 10^th arrondisement. In order to fully meet her, I needed to leave the land of memoir behind and trust this place called fiction.

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Comment by Jo Anne Valentine Simson on October 31, 2012 at 10:42am: Susan, I have also written a memoir of my two years in South Korea, currently titled: Korea, Are You at Peace? If I manage to get it published, would you be willing to look at it and do a blurb? Thanks for considering this request.

Comment by Susan Conley on October 31, 2012 at 9:59am: Thanks Jo Anne, I was in Paris as a college student as well. One my son's closest friends was from South Korea, so we had the unexpected chance to get to know that culture quite a bit while we were in China as well. Take good care.

Comment by Jo Anne Valentine Simson on October 23, 2012 at 5:12pm: Looks fascinating! I spent a year in Paris as a college student, and after retirement, spent two years in South Korea. I don't think I ever thought of Paris while I was in Korea! I'd love to read your memoir and the novel when it comes out.

Comment by Susan Conley on October 19, 2012 at 3:50pm: Thanks all. So interesting to hear your voices. Sorry I was underground. I was actually delivering the final final FINAL copy of Paris was the Place today. When I wrote the blog, the edits were in and I thought I was done. But I'm learning maybe we're never done! My editor has been quite amazing and she wanted to do one last blitz on some niggly stuff before we go to copyediting which starts Monday morning. I find that I am either "in" the novel right now, or out and there's not much in-between. Did anyone read that amazing profile of Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall) in the New Yorker last week? I was so struck by the details: when she is delivering a novel she doesn't sleep much and gets up at all hours and completely inhabits the novel in a kind of trance-like state. But she doesn't have kids. And that is a whole other blog perhaps for another day--a subject that's been circle and circled but one I never tire of either--how to be a writer and commit fully to the work and balance a family. In any case, thanks for all these compelling points of view. Good look with all your projects--whether fiction or non-fiction. I teach a lot here in Portland, Maine, and what I say is that I'm all about generating material and exploring the place where the story lies, no matter what genre we all the writing!

Comment by Kandace Chapple on October 19, 2012 at 9:18am: Great post. Loved it! Helping me re-think my current project!!!

Comment by Sally Pfoutz on October 17, 2012 at 6:56am: I think it takes a lot of courage to write a memoir.

Comment by Paulette Livers on October 17, 2012 at 5:53am: Very nice piece about finding voice, Susan. I also appreciated the discussion of sticking with a scene until the tension rises to the top. Thank you!

Comment by Geraldine Nesbitt on October 17, 2012 at 12:29am: I think my process has gone in the opposite direction. Having written several novels, I noticed that each one was coming closer to my own experiences, and that packaging them as fiction was becoming more complicated. So, half way through my last novel I decided to write two books simultaneously. Alongside one of my usual stories, a memoir is beginning to take shape. Notions and ideas that sometimes crept into my novels unsuspectingly are no longer just subliminal jolts, they are now fully fledged memories that get a respectable place in my mind.

Comment by Eva Schlesinger on October 16, 2012 at 11:35pm: Interesting story! I loved hearing about your process. I had a similar experience; writing personal essays helped me figure out how to show emotion in writing fiction. I look forward to reading your books.

Comment by Page Lambert on October 16, 2012 at 9:45pm: I lOVE this piece ... I'm working on a presentation for Women Writing the West, and may well refer to it. I will definitely refer a few of my clients (both men) to it, because they're both struggling with novels based on their own life experiences, and it's like pulling teeth (how's that for an original metaphor) to get them to let the characters begin to lead their own lives.