Background

So, whether you are planning on writing about your own experiences or on creating fiction, what are the differences or similarities in the two forms of writing? Let's backup to Biography and Autobiography. An Autobiography is a chronicle of a person's life from birth to death, or at least until the time the book was printed. A Biography may be described as an Autobiography written by another person, again, covering a lifespan.

Creative Fiction in general covers everything from personal memoirs to literary journalism covering the world. In between are personal essays, lyric essays, travel memoirs, opinion essays and all nonfiction that values language, voice, memory, research, and imagination to recreate the real world."

A memoir is a work that covers a chunk of time extracted from a person's life. A memoir, since it is one person's recollection, contains more latitude than the biographies. Memoirs often seek to capture a time, a place, or a person for posterity. Memoirs contain more conversational wording and delve more deeply into the feelings and psyche of the author. The timespan covered, allows such a delving reach into the individual's mind.

Your story about yourself can incorporate can . . . unbelieveably . . . other people as a primary part of your memoir. In fact, there are family memoirs written from the point of view of another person, which actually go into someone else’s head. There some rules we must follow, but start by discarding the old axiom —“We can only write about what we ourselves know as factual. Or else it’s FICTION.” A simplistic picture of nonfiction, creative nonfiction and fiction might appear as shown below.