Why write memoir as fiction?
I am often asked why I chose to write “A Dangerous Daughter” as fiction rather than as a memoir. These words by Jayne Tuttle, from Lee Kofman’s blog for writers, perfectly express my own feelings about why I chose to write two books based on truth as fiction not fact, not even creative non-fiction. From “The Ecstatic Truth in Creative Non-fiction:A Guest Post by Jayne Tuttle” published in Lee Kofman’s Blog for Writers: “My books are based around significant episodes in my life, but I am less interested in that than the sensations and ideas and questions they raise. So I take the true story, and try to tell it in as juste a way as I can. Meaning, I aim to communicate the feeling of this experience to my reader, not just recount the list of events. To do this, I shrink timelines, invent dialogue, play with detail and tone … I try to reconstruct the actual experience in as creative a way as I can, to fit the compact form of a book. A factual account would be a thousand pages, boring and indulgent.” — Read on leekofman.com.au/the-writer-laid-bare/the-ecstatic-truth-in-creative-nonfiction-a-guest-post-by-jayne-tuttle/
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Dina Davis Author 