Jason Brown
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, MY PARENTS WERE DERANGED AND self-centered, as all parents are. My mother was too busy frosting her hair and my father measuring the cheese to make sure no one in the family ate more than their portion. As a result, they let me watch too much TV, and for a long time I had trouble distinguishing between fiction and reality. One afternoon when I was six, I decided I was Mighty Mouse, and I pulled on my cape, opened the window of my second-story bedroom, and climbed onto the ledge. My mother was outside watering the sunflowers, and naturally she panicked. She raced upstairs and hauled me inside.
“You are not Mighty Mouse,” she said. “Mighty Mouse is not real. Do you understand?”
I said I did understand when I really didn't, which is a habit of responding to life's challenges that has served me with mixed results for many years. My thoughts have always roamed into the fictional world, which is a good thing: a fiction writer has to dream outside his or her own experience. How do writers move from the nonfiction of their experience to the fictional world of their narratives?
Some writing teachers will say there is a danger in writing autobiographical fiction, and others will insist that beginning writers should stick to their own experience. Beginning fiction writers who write about their own experience sometimes find that they can't maintain objectivity about their material. They can't shape the material into art because they are blinded by their own emotional relationship to what really happened. As a result, the writer moves himself to tears as he writes, but the reader (who is not the writer's mother) is bored, puzzled, or confused. On the other hand, beginning writers who choose material that is too far from their experience sometimes find that they can't fully imagine the story because it didn't happen to them. They weren't there.
The following exercise will help writers transform their own autobiographical material into fiction.
Identify a powerful and significant personal experience from your past and write an outline of the event. Now create a character whose biography differs from your own. The character might be a different age than you and a different gender; maybe she grew up in a different era or in a different part of the country. Write a brief biographical sketch for your character: include the larger details (gender, race, age) and the smaller details (breakfast cereal, clothes, gestures). Write a story with your fictional character encountering your experience. The details of what happens will be familiar, but your character's reactions should surprise you, and rightly so—he or she is not you.