The Autobiographical Novel: How Writers Fictionalize Their Lives

You’ve probably heard the old adage to write what you know. Many writers take this as an invitation to write about elements of their own lives and experiences, using memories and moments to shape a novel’s characters and events.

But when we write about our own lives, making the main character a version of ourselves, the story can falter. We lose the arc of the story, the tension, the natural shape of what the story wants (and needs) to say.

Well-crafted fiction relies on clean lines and crafted contours: a carefully measured plot that tells a story a reader can’t put down. And while you may be pulled to write about yourself and what you know, the truth is that real life, as interesting as it can be, doesn’t play out in a well-told narrative.

So, where should we draw the line? How much of yourself, your past, your worldview, and the experiences that have shaped you should appear on the pages of your novel?

In this article, writing coach Alice Kuipers offers several creative pathways for you to consider when writing a book based on your life. You’ll learn how to shape autobiographical material into compelling fiction and how to balance truth and imagination throughout your story.

With expert advice and tips from our team of writing coaches and professional editors, Alice’s guidance will help you consider the best approach for your story, no matter how much of your life you decide to put on the page.

{{blog-banner-3="/blog-banners"}}

3 options for writing autobiographical fiction

When we want to write about ourselves, there are three different formats our storytelling can take, and understanding each of these is vital to our writing success. We’ll explore each one in detail as we go, but let’s start with a quick summary so you can get an idea of where your fiction writing is sitting:

Option 1: using semi-autobiographical details in a story

You want to write about something that’s happened to you or that you know about, but you don’t want anyone to know it’s you. In this case, you want to write a novel by pulling elements from your life to create a fictional narrative.

Option 2: writing an autobiographical fiction novel

You want to write a novel that’s loosely based on your own life and experiences. In this case, you want to write autofiction, loosely inspired by the facts of real-life events.

Option 3: writing a true account of your real life

You want to mine your experiences and share them as they happened, through your lens. In this case, you want to write a memoir, using your experiences to create a compelling and true story of a portion of your life. (Note: memoir is often confused with autobiography, which is a full account of your entire life and almost exclusively for people who are well-known.)

Let’s start by diving deeper into Option 1: you want to write a novel using some elements from your life.

Writing semi-autobiographical fiction

We’ll start with this option, because finding out that you have a novel hiding inside you is often the path we see our writers take. They let go of autofiction or memoir and find a brilliant made-up story. This is partly because, in the current market, a book directly about your life (unless you’re a celebrity) can be a hard sell.

While there are always readers for autofiction and memoir, both of which we’ll explore at length, one of the biggest lessons we teach our writers at The Novelry is how to separate what they know about the world from who their protagonist is. This gives you the opportunity to share what you know using the lens of fiction.

Let’s start by taking a look at a wildly imaginative author, well known for her fiction: P.D. James. She was the famed author of detective fiction novels and innumerable TV and film adaptations.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.
—P.D. James

It’s a sentence that at first doesn’t seem to make any sense. Fiction, by its definition, is made up and imaginary, using invented characters and settings. And autobiography is the retelling of the facts of a life lived.

So, what did P.D. James mean when she said that all fiction is largely autobiographical?

Let’s think about the character P.D. James is best known for—Adam Dalgleish, a widower who lost his wife in childbirth. At first, we see how different he is from the author who created him. He’s a Detective Chief Inspector and phobic of commitment (until the novel The Private Patient in 2008).

P.D. James was nothing like Dalgleish. She worked for a hospital board, had two children, and didn’t become a widow until after the first Adam Dalgleish novel was published. Yet if we look closer, we can see how her personal experiences infuse the writing of her iconic hero.

The first similarity is that both she and her protagonist share a love of language. Dalgleish is a poet, published, and often thinks in terms of poetry as he solves crimes. Additionally, many of the mysteries he uncovered involved bureaucracies, which P.D. James encountered through her own work.

What she’s saying in the quote is that every piece of fiction, regardless of its genre or setting, is inevitably colored by the author’s personal experiences, beliefs, and emotions. Even in fantastical narratives, the themes, character motivations, and conflicts often mirror the author’s inner world.

As J.M. Coetzee aptly noted:

All writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it.
—J.M. Coetzee

This means that you very much can write about yourself even as you’re writing fiction, although we do have a crucial tip to help you succeed.

The secret to putting a little of yourself into novel form

Emerging writers often create a character just like them and then find themselves stuck at around 30,000 words. We call this the 30,000-word slump.

At The Novelry, we believe that you should consider writing a character who bears very little resemblance to how you see yourself. Successful fiction writers deliberately craft a hook and a protagonist who are different from them and the life they’ve lived, and then infuse that person with their experiences and what they know.

As Louise Dean, founder of The Novelry, shares:

If you give your fears and foibles to someone who is like you, it won’t work. You’ll be back to square one, puzzling over how to write a book about your life that anyone would want to read. You’ll have no sympathy at all. Your character won’t be able to solve your problems, and you’ll treat ‘them’ with the impatience and disdain you reserve for yourself. Like all people, writers struggle to have empathy for themselves.
—Louise Dean

Crafting a character in autobiographical fiction

In our writing classes, we help our writers think about their main character by having them think about something we call The Five Fs®. These give us a great shape for storytelling, and if you travel through our flagship Finished Novel Course, you’ll hear them over and over.

We also use a character questionnaire to get to know the person we’re inventing. One way to make a main character very different from yourself, so they can really travel this journey of The Five Fs, is to answer these questions with opposite or very different responses to those you would give.

Questions for your character

• How old are they?
• Where do they live?
• What does your character do when they wake up?
• What is your character’s job?
• What is their favorite thing to do?

After that, you can play with giving your fictional character some of your experiences. Use the following questions to get started:

• What is a secret you’ve never told anyone? Could a version of this be your character’s secret?
• What is something you’d like to do someday, if only you could? Could your character want to do this, too? Could they DO this?

In this way, you gift your protagonist with your experiences, yet they are a very different person from you, which gives you momentum to start writing a manuscript all the way to the end. Making your protagonist different from you, the author, gives you the freedom and distance of a fuller storytelling arc—and a clearer lens through which to see who your invented person could be, flaws and all.

Our writing coach Evie Wyld says:

My novels are a mixture of family lore and real people hidden in different costumes. I usually start a piece of fiction thinking about something that has happened to me or someone close to me, and I try to think my way into other points of view on it.
—Evie Wyld

Many famous authors have used this technique to create bestselling novels. Leading British neuroscientist David Attwell described what he noticed when he studied the works of the novelist J.M. Coetzee, whose masterpiece Disgrace we dive into in our course:

The Coetzee who emerges from an informed reading of his papers is a very different author from the one we thought we knew. Most surprisingly, his writing process turns out to be highly autobiographical, at least in its points of departure. It then involves a gradual, but determined process of writing himself out of the narratives, a ‘burning off of the self’ as it were.
—David Attwell

These points of departure are a place for you, as the author, to set yourself free when you start writing.

Writing a fully autobiographical novel

Having said all this, for some writers, the idea of having themselves as the protagonist is absolutely the book they want to write. They don’t want to write a book about someone different from them.

At The Novelry, we want our writers to use our resources as tools, not rules. After all, you’re a creative and imaginative writer, and you want to put words on the page your way. If you want the main character to be like you in a semi-autobiographical novel, or fully YOU in an account of your life stories, remember that you have two more options:

Option 2: writing an autobiographical novel (autofiction)

Option 3: writing a true account of your real life (memoir)

Let’s look into both of these, and you’ll be able to see what suits your writing life, your manuscript, and your ambitions for your autobiographical novel.

What is autofiction?

Autofiction is a genre that blends biography and fiction. Often, the protagonist shares so many similarities with the author that it can be difficult to see where reality ends and fiction begins. Authors of autofiction invent events, characteristics, subplots, and settings using their own creativity to serve the storytelling, using what they know about life to explore what they cannot.

With the lines of fact and fabrication blurred, readers are engaged in wondering what’s real, what isn’t, and how they can figure out which is which.
—Jane Friedman

All Fours by Miranda July

A great example of autofiction is All Fours by Miranda July. In this popular recent book, the main character is a 45-year-old artist and mother—similar to July herself, who is a writer and mother. The main character decides to take a road trip, but ends up in a motel with a man who isn’t her husband.

Within the opening lines, Miranda July writes:

Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life for a note like this.
—Miranda July, All Fours

It’s both compelling and intimate, like the book itself, which is published as a novel, even though many reviewers describe it as autofiction.

The Guardian says:

July’s characters often wonder what is real and what’s not. How far can our minds take us – dreaming, fantasising, making art – and when must we return to a shared reality? [...] By tangling explicitly with reality across mediums July pushes autofiction to new limits.
—The Guardian

The book was a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and is a book club favorite because so many readers see themselves reflected in the protagonist’s journey. This is one of the beauties of autofiction—the relationship the reader feels with the author.

Heartburn by Nora Ephron

Another example of autofiction, which we use as a Hero Book at The Novelry, is Heartburn by Nora Ephron. Heartburn was Ephron’s only fictional book—she wrote memoir, non-fiction, and screenplays—and it was phenomenally successful. It opened up a new trend in women’s fiction, became a massive bestseller, and was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.

Heartburn was almost entirely based on Ephron’s marriage to and divorce from her second husband: real events in Ephron’s life turned into autobiographical fiction. But she made her protagonist a chef instead of a writer, and changed events to strengthen her story structure.

It’s worth asking why she chose to do this, because it helps us think about what type of book we want to write ourselves. Often, writers of memoir and any work that is factually truthful are afraid of what their families will feel when they read it, so fictionalizing some elements gives the writer a way to break free from that fear.

Ephron said that she wanted to find ‘humor in her heartbreak,’ and the resulting novel seems to have given her a way to process what happened but also to find distance. Her final version of the work did what good autofiction does—conveyed emotional truth even as the book slid from factual truths, and left readers wondering where truth and reality blurred.

As The New York Times said when the book was published:

It’s a fairly pointless exercise to keep substituting real people and events for what goes on in the course of Heartburn. After all, even the most scrupulous attempts to reproduce reality in prose always end up being violent distortions of the actual. And to compare Miss Ephron’s story with reality, far from enhancing its effectiveness, is likely to distance the reader from the novel’s modest virtues as a work of the imagination.
—The New York Times

‘Loosely based on’: the keys to writing autofiction

Often these books are written using the ‘I’ voice, and they cover only a portion of the main character’s life, much like memoir does (as we’ll explore shortly). Here are two key ways you can get started on your autobiographical novel.

1. Think about real events

Mine your own memories and life experiences for moments that could build a story. Your protagonist will need to undergo a journey, and they’ll need to be different at the end of the book to who they were at the beginning. Stories are about change, not stasis—so when you write your memories down, think about the interesting ideas you’ve come up with and how they could be used to show that change.

2. Making a great story even better

Be ready to explore the creative liberties and artistic license that autobiographical novels allow for. What would this story be like if you changed the setting? Or if the protagonist took a very different turn from the one you did in your real life?

When we’re coaching writers on how to turn their idea into a book readers will love, some feel strongly that they want to stick to the factual truth and not fictionalize any elements at all. In this case, we help them craft a compelling memoir.

Autofiction is a genre that blends biography and fiction. Often, the protagonist shares so many similarities with the author that it can be difficult to see where reality ends and fiction begins.
—Alice Kuipers

What is a memoir?

These books focus on the author’s own experiences during a period of their life and are always told from their point of view. Wonderful examples include Richard Beard’s The Day That Went Missing, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, or I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. In all of these memoirs, the writer is looking at a theme or question and using events of their lived experience to excavate it for the reader.

A memoir is not narrative non-fiction, which is more journalistic and often has a wide-ranging scope, rather than being about one person’s life. On this, our editor Sadé Omeje says:

Memoir as a genre can sometimes be difficult to initially differentiate from other non-fiction forms, such as narrative non-fiction. However, my understanding is that narrative non-fiction, or what’s known as literary non-fiction, is a true story written in the style of fiction. The prose is compulsive, but factual, and strung together through the narrative literary techniques the writer adopts for their work.

Narrative non-fiction conveys real-life stories or events with a style of prose that reads like a novel. It can often be a true account of another person’s life or a cluster of figures and/or true events, like Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City or Sally Hayden’s My Fourth Time, We Drowned. Narrative non-fiction often requires more research and refinement in order to bring the details of another person’s life together in a factual yet compelling, propulsive way.
—Sadé Omeje

As we’ve already established, if you’re writing a novel, you’ll want to distance yourself from your protagonist. But if you’re writing a memoir, you are the main character. This means that the story structure of The Five Fs, which we looked at earlier, must pertain to you.

Storytelling is fundamentally about growth and change, so a memoirist must ask themselves: What is my story arc? And how does the character arc work when your protagonist... is you?

It’s helpful to do two things at this stage.

1. Firstly, remember that a memoir isn’t an account of an author’s life in its entirety, but rather, a look at a slice of what you’ve lived. When you consider what your Five Fs could be, it’s easier to see a timeline that might work for your memoir.
2. Then you will need to ask yourself if you’ve placed enough distance between you and the events you want to write about to be able to see them clearly before you start writing a first draft.

Bestselling author and writing coach Heather Webb says:

My best piece of advice would be to separate yourself from the ‘past you’ as much as you can. It’s a good idea to think about Past You as the main character in a book that reads a lot like fiction. You’re telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end, with the aim of taking your readers along with you. To that end, there needs to be tension on the page, emotional turning points, distinctive voice, and a satisfying ending. Though a person’s life doesn’t fit neatly into a three-act structure, a memoir should fit neatly into this structure—just like the biographical historicals I’ve written. It can take some doing to find the heart of the story when we consider how much we must leave out, but in the end, it’ll make for a much stronger and more engaging read.
—Heather Webb

If we don’t have enough distance, it’s hard to recognize our own character flaws (hint: this is an important element of The Five Fs). Often when writing memoir, it’s because we feel strongly that the book has to be written. Sometimes that’s cathartic, sometimes it’s because you need your version of certain events to be on the page.

Finding the distance that a memoir needs in order to be written does require you to be able to assess who you were, and who you became because of what you lived through, with clear eyes. Sometimes, time has to pass for you to be able to do this.
—Alice Kuipers

You can read more on our blog about how to craft a compelling memoir and the five essential ingredients you’ll need to write it, and you may also be interested in this article about memoirist Alice Carrière’s approach to writing about her own life.

So, how do you choose your level of autobiographical fiction?

The answer to the question of what type of book we want to write often comes through the writing process itself. If you’re still not sure and would like more of a handle on things before you begin writing your first draft, here’s an exercise from our Memoir Mini Course for you to try...

Think of a moment in your life that you wish you’d handled differently.

1. Write the scene as it happened, texturing your memories on the page with sensory details. Close your eyes and take time to really be back in that moment. Be gentle with yourself as you do this—take breaks, walk away if needed. Sometimes the past is painful.
2. Now write the scene as you wish it had happened. This is an opportunity to fictionalize reality. What would you have said? (Oh, that feeling of finally being able to say it!)
3. Think about which scene makes you feel most comfortable in the writing.
4. Finally, try answering the following questions to help make sense of where your natural fit as a writer may be:

• Do you prefer having the freedom to invent?
• Or do you like the way that excavating the truth of your past feels on the page?

As you consider the answers, know that you are giving yourself the freedom to explore the book you most want to write. And to finish, our founder, Louise Dean, has this advice for you:

You can think of writing as a form of therapy. The story starts with your deepest concern, and your inability to cope with it. You look your ineptitude in the eye and see it, but you can’t deal with it. So give it to someone else to deal with! Write the book about yourself and your fears, but palm them off to some other character. While memoir focuses on you as you really are—a book about your life in the most straightforward way—the story you write can take aspects of yourself and your experiences and share them around a cast of fictional characters.
—Louise Dean

Remember: you get to choose.

Write your novel with personal coaching from Alice Kuipers

Join us on a novel writing course at The Novelry, and you can receive expert guidance and personalized feedback from an award-winning author like Alice as your mentor. Find out more about how you can work one-on-one with our encouraging and insightful writing coaches and our professional editing team, and take a step closer to your writing goal.

Wherever you are on your journey as a writer, our novel writing courses offer the complete pathway from the idea to ‘The End.’ With personal coaching, live classes, community support, and step-by-step lessons to fit your schedule and inspire you daily, we’ll help you complete your book with our unique one-hour-a-day method. Learn from bestselling authors and publishing editors to live—and love—the writer’s life. Sign up and start today. The Novelry is the famous fiction writing school that is open to all!