“Writing human beings as ‘characters’ is chief among all sins of the memoir writer. Unfortunately, it’s painfully easy to turn people into flat characters in a format so focused around recoloring the past” (Meagan Shelley, “In Search of a Third Dimension: On Characterization in Memoir,” The Writer, August 2021). Fiction writers can fall into the same trap, creating cardboard villains or cloying saints who lack complexity. My favorite challenge as a fiction writer is to make an unsympathetic character interesting — not necessarily likable, but humanized with a range of emotions and behaviors. To do that, I must first empathize with them. Finding that empathy can be harder for the memoir writer whose opinions of a person or event are fixed. Waiting before writing offers a solution. Time and distance allow the memoirist’s perspective to widen and become more flexible. More thoughts about writing at REFLECTIONS .
