To write a novel about your life, first decide which of three books you are writing: a memoir, which promises that everything happened; autofiction, which keeps a narrator close to you but borrows the novel's freedom; or an autobiographical novel, which turns your life into invented characters and a plot. Then keep the emotional truth, change whatever would identify real people, and invent the events your life didn't supply. Life rarely has a plot, and a novel needs one.
Below: how to choose between the three, what fiction lets you change (with Dickens's own example), writing about real people, giving a life a plot, and eight steps from memory to draft. If you already know you are writing nonfiction, the guide on how to write a memoir is the better starting point.
Memoir, autofiction or autobiographical novel
The three differ in what they promise the reader, and the promise decides how much you may invent.
| Memoir | Autofiction | Autobiographical novel | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The promise | MemoirThis happened | AutofictionThis is me, told as a novel | Autobiographical novelThis is a story that grew from my life |
| The narrator | MemoirYou, by name | AutofictionYou, or a near-double of you | Autobiographical novelAn invented character |
| What you may invent | MemoirNothing; you reconstruct | AutofictionScenes, order, dialogue, some events | Autobiographical novelAnything |
| Shelved as | MemoirNonfiction | AutofictionFiction | Autobiographical novelFiction |
| Example | MemoirJoan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking | AutofictionJules Vallès, L'Enfant | Autobiographical novelCharles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50) |
Here is one memory told all three ways. The facts barely move; what the reader is asked to believe does.
As memoir. The night my father fell, I drove the two hours to Toledo in my slippers. I had meant to tell him something for thirty years. In the ER, I told him the parking was terrible.
As autofiction. The night my father fell, I drove to Toledo in my slippers. In the ER I finally told him what I had meant to say for thirty years, and he said, “I know.”
As a novel premise. Nora Kowalczyk has one winter to sell her father's house in Toledo over her sister's objections, and one hospital visit left to say what she never said.
The memoir asks readers to trust the record: this happened, and the narrator is the author. The autofiction asks them to trust the narrator, who is the author or nearly, while accepting that any event, such as that conversation, may be invented, and the book won't say which. The novel asks only that they believe the story while they read it; none of it has to have happened.
Four questions settle most cases:
- Does the story need events that didn't happen? Then it isn't a memoir. Memoir lets you reconstruct dialogue and compress time, not invent.
- Who could be hurt if readers took it all as true? A novel can give real people cover, but only if you change enough that they can't be recognized.
- Is the subject your own mind, or the story? Autofiction suits a book about a narrator thinking through a life. A novel suits a book driven by what happens next.
- Can you live with “which parts are true?” Readers of autofiction will always ask. Readers of a novel drawn from life ask less, if the disguise is good.
You can draft before you decide, but decide before you revise, because the choice changes what every page owes the reader. If the answer is memoir, the guide on how to write a memoir takes it from there. For where autofiction sits among other kinds of novel, see the book genres list.
What fiction lets you change
A novel drawn from life works by keeping how it felt and moving the facts. These are the usual levers, roughly from smallest to largest:
- Names, and everything attached to them. A new name on the same job, town and haircut disguises no one. Change the work, the age, the looks and the hometown with it.
- Places. Move the story to a town like yours, or build one from two you know.
- Time. Compress three years into one winter. Even nonfiction does this: Thoreau says Walden puts “the experience of two years into one.”
- People. Merge two real people into one character, or split one person into two who each carry half of what they meant to you.
- Events. Invent the scene your memory is missing, or the confrontation that never happened.
- The ending. In a novel the outcome belongs to the story, not to the record. Change it if the story needs it.
- The protagonist. Change their gender, age, job or place in the family, and keep the wound. Readers recognize feelings, not résumés.
- The point of view. Telling it in the third person, or from the point of view of someone else who was there, gives you distance from your own life.
Dickens pulls several of these levers at once. As a boy he was put to work in a blacking warehouse, covering pots of paste-blacking with paper and pasting on labels. Years afterward he wrote about it in a private fragment, which his biographer John Forster printed. Compare one sentence from the fragment with the novel:
The fragment. No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast.
The novel. No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these henceforth everyday associates with those of my happier childhood—not to say with Steerforth, Traddles, and the rest of those boys; and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my bosom.
Forster says the warehouse manuscript “was embodied in the substance of the eleventh and earlier chapters” of David Copperfield. Dickens kept his own sentence almost word for word and moved everything around it: David is ten, works in a wine warehouse rinsing bottles, and measures his workmates against Steerforth and Traddles, schoolfriends who exist only in the novel. The feeling is the true part. The facts were free to move.
Writing about real people
People who know you will look for themselves in the book, and they will find themselves even where you didn't intend it. Charlotte Brontë drew Lowood, the harsh school in Jane Eyre (1847), from the school at Cowan Bridge, where her two eldest sisters fell ill; both died in 1825. Elizabeth Gaskell's 1857 biography calls Jane's friend Helen Burns “as exact a transcript of Maria Brontë” as Charlotte could make, and reports that Charlotte would not have written what she did of Lowood had she foreseen how closely readers would tie it to the real school.
Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (1929) filled its pages with more than 200 thinly disguised people from his hometown, and the uproar kept him away from Asheville until 1937. Both books show a cost that comes before any legal question: people recognize themselves and their neighbors, whatever the names say.
That leaves two separate questions, and it helps to keep them apart. The craft question is how far to disguise people and what you owe them, and the answer is yours to choose. The legal question depends on where the book is published and read, and the notes below cover only the US.
For the craft question, run each real person through a disguise test before you send the manuscript out:
Give your life a plot
Life is episodic. Things happen, then other things, and the big moments rarely arrive in a useful order. A novel needs a protagonist who wants something, opposition, rising stakes and an ending that answers the opening. The way through is to keep the conflict from your life and invent the plot around it.
| What happened | What the novel does | Why |
|---|---|---|
| What happenedThree years caring for your father in Toledo while your marriage slowly ended | What the novel doesOne winter, from the night he falls to the sale of the house in March | WhyA deadline makes every scene count |
| What happenedTwo sisters who helped, one more than the other | What the novel doesOne sister, who wants to keep the house | WhyA merged character becomes an opponent with a reason |
| What happenedYou never told him what you meant to say | What the novel doesA hospital scene where Nora, the protagonist, nearly does, and doesn't | WhyThe novel can stage the conversation life withheld |
| What happenedHe died quietly in hospice | What the novel doesThe same, but Nora must choose whether to be there | WhyA choice gives the ending to the protagonist |
| What happenedYou moved to Denver two years later | What the novel doesCut | WhyAfter the climax, the story is over |
For the shape itself, the guide to story structure compares the main patterns, from three acts to nonlinear books.
Eight steps from memory to novel
- Write the true version first, privately
Before you change anything, write down what happened as plainly as you can, in a document only you will read: dates, places, what was said. This is your record. The novel gets written somewhere else.
- Find the conflict, not the chronology
Look for the one tension that runs through the material: between two people, two places or two versions of yourself. That conflict is the book. Everything else is research.
- Decide what kind of book it is
Use the four questions above. If the story needs invention, it is fiction. If you want to stand behind every fact, it is memoir.
- Make a change list
In a separate document, list every real person and place with the fictional version beside it: new name, new job, new town, merged or split. Add each change as you make it, so chapter 20 doesn't contradict chapter 3. If you draft in Strokes, attach the change list to a chat with the Strokes Assistant and ask it to review the project for slips, such as a real name that crept back into chapter 12.
- Build a protagonist who isn't you
Give them your wound and a different life around it. A character you can see from outside is easier to let fail, struggle and change. The character profile template keeps the details straight.
- Invent the plot your life didn't have
Give the protagonist a want, a deadline and an opponent, then outline the turns in the novel outline template.
- Draft without checking the past
When the story wants something your life didn't do, let the story win. Go back to the true version for texture, such as a smell, a phrase or a street, not for permission.
- Revise with a recognition pass
Read the finished draft once as each real person would. Wherever someone could recognize themselves in a damaging role, change more. Then decide whether to add an author's note saying what is real, like the one in autobiography examples.
Mistakes that keep it a diary
- “But that's what happened.” A scene stays because it is true, not because it works. In a novel the only test is the story.
- A passive stand-in. The character based on you watches things happen, because that's how it felt. Give them choices.
- Too many people. Real life had four aunts. The novel needs one, maybe two.
- Only the names changed. If the job, town and looks are the same, everyone who knows you knows who it is.
- Settling scores. Readers can tell when a character exists to be punished, and they take that character's side.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need permission to write about real people in a novel?
In the US there is no general rule that you must ask, but fiction is not a shield: a character can be the basis of a defamation claim if readers could reasonably take the character for a real person, and a fiction disclaimer will not automatically stop a claim. Disguise people thoroughly, keep damaging invented acts away from recognizable characters, and ask a media lawyer when in doubt. Other countries' laws differ. This is not legal advice.
Is it enough to change the names?
No. People are recognized by job, place, looks, family position and story, not only by name. If a coworker or neighbor could still identify the character, change more: merge people, move the setting, alter ages and occupations, and invent events. A good sign is when the person could not be sure the character is them.
Should a novel about my life be in first or third person?
Either works. First person keeps the voice close to your own and suits autofiction. Third person gives distance, which can make it easier to see your stand-in clearly, let them fail and invent around them. If you're unsure, write one chapter both ways and keep the version you would rather go on writing.
