Join me in this live, two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the powerful ways that imagination can operate in nonfiction writing – and how reality can ballast fiction in ways that make it more persuasive.

I’m Matthew Specktor. I’m a novelist, memoirist, cultural critic, and screenwriter, and I’d like to invite you to my class Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing the Self in Memoir and Fiction.

I’m the author of four books, two of them novels that might fairly be termed “autobiographical,” and two of them memoirs that have some of the more inventive, expansive qualities of fiction. I like writing about things that actually happened. I also like—in fact, need—to invent while I’m writing, which is essential to writing things that feel alive on the page. My latest, The Golden Hour, comes out in April, and it’s both an intimate family history—a traditional memoir, so far as that goes—and a novelistic nonfiction history of modern Hollywood with an enormous cast of characters. So how does one thread that needle? How do you invent when you’re writing memoir in a way that doesn’t violate the terms and conditions of nonfiction, so to speak? And how do you introduce deeply, even radioactively, personal material into your fiction without being overwhelmed by it, without the work starting to feel more like a journal entry than a story or a novel?

This is a class that will be equally helpful to both memoirists and novelists, and to those who are (as can so often happen) caught between, trying to decide which avenue to take with their story. We’re going to take a close—in fact, a forensic—look at a handful of examples, we’re going to talk about structure, tone, and style (true stories can feel harder to shape than imagined ones, insofar as one is working with a different set of constraints), and we’re going to talk, of course, about truth and about facts: about how and where imagination can operate in nonfiction material and how reality can ballast fiction to make it more persuasive. And we’re going to talk a lot about narrators, because it’s my experience that when you really figure out who is telling the story (‘who,’ on the page, I mean: this can be harder when that person is ostensibly yourself!), everything else that we tend to worry about in writing—plot, timing, shape—frequently falls sharply into place.

I aim to teach this class towards beginning and experienced writers alike (and nonwriters too!) because the work of creating the self on the page, and elsewhere, is the work of a lifetime, and because creating a truly interesting presence on the page—creating a lively and engaging storyteller and protagonist—is the soul of what writing is. It’s what binds the reader, and it’s the most joyful and exhilarating part of the process. I hope you’ll join me!

– Matthew Specktor