The Middle Ground: the Boundary Region Where Fiction and Non-Fiction Live

Ever wonder why some of our favorite fictional characters read like real, historical figures? Or why the best memoirs we've read unfold cinematically--as rich and lavish as fully realized novels? I wrote a memoir that I tried to make read as richly as a novel. Now I’ve written a novel that comes out this week that features a first-person narrator who I could swear sometimes thinks she is in a memoir. 

I’ve given a name to this place that I find myself inhabiting as a writer, where I’m moving from memoir to fiction and then back. I’m calling it the middle ground. I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with this title. But it’s working for me this month as I get ready to go out in the world with a novel and call myself a fiction writer.

For me the middle ground is the fertile territory where fiction writers mine their life experiences and non-fiction writers transform the bare facts of their lives into something more meaningful.

Colm Toibin, the great Irish fiction writer, recently said, "If I tried to write about a lighthouse and used one that I had never seen and did not know, it would show in the sentences. Nothing would work; it would have no resonance for me, or for anyone else. If I made up a mother and put her in another town, a town I had never seen, I wouldn’t bother working at all... If I had to stick to the facts, the bare truth of things, that would be no use either..."

The American novelist Richard Russo was also recently interviewed about his memoir, Elsewhere. He said, "the best memoirs read like novels, which means, among other things, that the writer must decide what fits the narrative arc and what doesn’t. The fact that something actually happened doesn’t mean it should be included. A memoirist isn’t free to invent, but the shape of the story is up to him. He decides — as in a novel — how and where the story begins (near the end, in this case). He also chooses, just as a novelist does, when to summarize and when time should slow down for a dramatic scene."

Toibin and Russo give me permission to go back and forth from the facts to the fictive. They both use their pasts as springboards for compelling and enlivened stories and they arrive at emotional breakthroughs—moments when they really know their characters and allow them autonomy on the page. There are searing emotional truths to be found in both these writers’ books.

You may write memoir or novels, or maybe both. But I think the emotional connection is what matters most in what you write. Toibin and Russo have helped show me the way through the middle ground. They’ve given me a kind of map. And now, on the eve of publication, I find that I simply need to trust these new voices I've created on the pages of my novel. I think this is the trust we all need to put into our writing—staying stubborn, banishing the censor, doing the hard work, whether fact or fiction.

Susan Conley is the author of the novel Paris Was the Place, published by Knopf on August 6th, 2013 and the memoir The Foremost Good Fortune (Knopf 2011). She’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post and Maine Magazine. You can follow Susan on Facebook and Twitter and at her website: susanconley.com.