6 Writing Techniques That Helped Me Shift From Fiction to Memoir

When I first thought of telling the story of my parents’ love affair in London during World War II, I wanted to write it as a novel. After all, I’d written fiction for readers of all ages and even though, in Eudora Welty’s wise words, “each story teaches me how to write it but not how to write the next one,” the story had such potential.

(5 Tips for Incorporating Sensitive Family Material Into a Memoir)

My 16-year-old British mother met my 28-year-old American father at a dinner in a baronial castle in Yorkshire, England, on August 31, 1942, the exact day that my mother’s only brother was dive-bombed by a German Stuka in Egypt. What a scene, I thought. What timing. Roll the cameras.

It didn’t take me long to realize that it was going to be much too hard to create fictional characters based on the real people I knew. How could I presume to understand my mother’s fears as she heard the bombs dropping on the church across the street from her flat or my father’s horror at the killings he witnessed in the Italian campaign?

Early in the writing process, I made two crucial decisions. I would write my family history as a memoir, a genre I’d never attempted. And I would focus on my mother. Here are six elements that helped me make the switch.

I always start with research—whether I’m looking to set the scene in a historical novel or the tone in a contemporary one. No matter what, I need to know where the characters live, how they dress, what form of speech they use, what the atmosphere is in their house or family or city. How does the historical time they are living in affect the way they think and feel?

The research for this book was personal, but just as important. I read the letters my father wrote home from the war to his parents, especially the ones describing the “16-year-old charmer” he decided to marry the night they met. I interviewed my mother, first on tape and then with a video camera, so she could tell me the stories of her childhood in Gibraltar and her job as a decoding agent for MI5, the British secret service.

I dug through boxes of documents and photographs and letters in her basement and scanned the important ones. I knew my father’s American relatives who lived up and down the East Coast, but my mother’s British family was mostly a mystery to me as she’d said little about them. Now, as I put the documents in front of her and began to ask questions, she opened up. My research was paying off.

I’ve always used setting as a way to start a story moving in my head. So, for this book, I traveled to Gibraltar to see where my mother had lived, to “meet” the Barbary Apes who used to snatch the clothes off her family’s rooftop laundry line, to stand under the arch where my great-grandfather had been knighted by the Duke of Cornwall, to walk along the docks where my grandfather had reported suspicious shipments of German arms to the authorities.

I took hundreds of photographs that I knew I would need later when setting scenes in my book. I went to England where I was lucky enough to be able to visit every place my mother had lived from her Catholic convent school, now a Marriott golf spa, to the baronial Yorkshire castle where she first met my father, to the family flat she lived in on Pont Street in the Chelsea district of London.

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For me, research and setting develop character. And now, even though my mother wouldn’t be a fictional character in this book, I still needed to bring her alive on the page. I had to force myself to look at her as if I’d never met her and find ways to describe her to my readers.

So, I asked myself the questions I ask when I’m creating a fictional character. What scares them? What excites them? What’s the first thing they would grab in a fire? Why did you beg to go to boarding school in England? How did it feel as a 14-year-old to watch your precious boxes of books fall into Gibraltar harbor just as you were boarding the evacuation ship? Why was your wedding bouquet tucked into your belt?

Figuring out the point of view is the key to slipping inside your story, whether it be one you’re making up or one you’re recording. First person was a given in memoir, but what tense? Although I started out trying to tell it “straight,” I quickly learned that first person, past tense felt too distant, too removed in time.

My parents’ story went stale on the page because the reader knows I wasn’t there and could only report the events as I learned about them decades after they happened. This pushed me to reconsider the structure of the book.

In the end, I developed what is called a braided narrative. As a counterpoint to my recording of the past, I found a first-person, present-tense voice in which I detailed my struggles trying to care for my mother as she slipped into dementia. Moving back and forth in time added a certain poignancy to the story.

The reader meets the brave young pregnant bride who crosses the North Atlantic in convoy in December of 1944, and on the next page, meets her again as a woman in her 80s who struggles to remember which guest came for lunch an hour ago or that the dog she loves had to be put down the week before.

In memoir, the narrator and the protagonist are two different people. The narrator is the one looking back, recording, telling the story, and musing on what it means. The protagonist is the person who lived it. During the war, my mother had signed the Official Secrets Act and my father had parachuted behind enemy lines into France.

They were trained to keep secrets from one another, and they carried that habit into the marriage. In Part II, I drop the braided narrative and stay firmly in the past tense so that the focus rests on the little girl who must try to decode the strangely muted and ominous signals in the house of her childhood.

So many of the techniques I’ve used in writing stories from my imagination served me in approaching memoir. The research I did and the settings I explored moved my characters from an idea on the page to moving, breathing people.

Once these people had come alive, I asked them the kind of questions that revealed what they really cared about. Deciding where I, the narrator, stood in relationship to these characters and their history helped me find the right point of view so I could structure the story in a way that allowed me to stay true to myself and to the tale I had come to tell at the same time.

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