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This essay is the seventh in my new Inside the Story series, where I share the creative decisions, real-life influences, and writing philosophy behind my novels.
Why Didn’t You Just Write a Memoir?
If you’ve lived through difficult experiences, why invent characters? Why create Beth Clark rather than simply tell your own story?
I’ve been asked that question, and it’s a fair one. Memoir is a powerful way to convey a message. It preserves memories, bears witness to the truth, and allows someone to say, “This happened.” I could have written a memoir, but I chose a different path.
Fiction allowed me to ask a different kind of question. It wasn’t only, “What happened to me?” but rather, “What might this mean for all of us?”
In my novel, What Remains After, Beth Clark needed to become her own person, not a fictional stand-in for me. I wanted the story to reach beyond my experiences and explore something larger.
Beth Is Not Me, but I Know Some of Her Emotional Truth
If you’ve read What Remains After, you might wonder whether Beth is me.
She isn’t.
She has her own history, family dynamics, personality, fears, strengths, and choices. I didn’t experience every event Beth does, and that was intentional. I wanted her story to reach beyond my own.
Still, I know something about her experiences. I’ve experienced fear, trauma, and shame. I’ve been betrayed by people I should have trusted. I’ve felt the loneliness of being unable to share my story. I’ve also known hope, learned to forgive, and built resilience.
Just like Beth.
These emotional realities can become building blocks for fiction without turning the resulting story into autobiography. This allows readers who have never experienced Beth’s circumstances to recognize something of themselves in her rather than simply attaching everything to me as a real person.
Fiction doesn’t ask, “Has this happened to you?” It asks, “Have you ever felt something like this?”
Biography can tell us what happened. Story can explore what an experience means, allowing room for interpretations beyond my own.
Fiction Gave Me Freedom and Privacy
Memoir inevitably involves real people, events, and relationships. Even when names are changed, people and situations may remain recognizable.
Fiction gave me the freedom to draw on some of my experiences, blend them with the experiences of others, and use my imagination to transform them, giving me both artistic and personal freedom.
Characters can emerge from observations I’ve made, fragments of my own experience, imagination, questions I’ve asked and been asked, and pieces of stories shared with me by multiple people rather than from a single real individual. The character who emerges from that process is someone new.
This character frees me to ask questions autobiography cannot answer simply by recording what happened.
What if someone had believed Beth? What if someone had spoken sooner? What if courage had arrived later? What if forgiveness had become possible? What if hope had survived?
Questions like these don’t rewrite my personal history. They allow fiction to explore possibilities beyond it.
Story Invites Readers In
Some people will eagerly read a memoir about childhood trauma. Others may never pick one up because a true story about terrible events disturbs them. But those same readers might choose a psychological suspense novel, family drama, mystery, or literary novel.
They come for the story.
Then something interesting happens.
Instead of being told what to think about trauma, institutional failure, faith, forgiveness, community, or grace, they encounter characters who live through those questions. Rather than saying, “Let me teach you about childhood trauma through my personal experience,” fiction can say, “Let me introduce you to Beth.”
Readers begin asking their own questions.
Would I have noticed a Beth in my life? Would I have believed her? What would I have done? Who am I in this story?
Stories can create empathy before they create agreement.
The goal isn’t to manipulate readers into agreeing with me because it’s my story. The goal is to create enough room for them to encounter difficult questions through the lives of fictional people they have come to care about.
Every Reader Brings a Different Story
No two people read What Remains After in the same way. One reader may identify with Beth, another with Otto. Someone else may be drawn to Frank and Marg. Another reader may recognize something uncomfortable in an adult who failed to notice or act.
Readers bring their own histories, relationships, griefs, beliefs, and experiences to a story. That means the novel’s meaning isn’t limited to my biography.
Perhaps that is one of fiction’s quiet miracles: I write one story, but every reader encounters it from a different life.
Faith and the Power of Story
Jesus frequently used parables to communicate profound truths.
The Good Samaritan. The Prodigal Son. The Lost Sheep.
My stories can’t compare to Jesus’ parables. I don’t write Scripture, thank goodness for that! My point is simply that storytelling has long been a powerful way to invite people to encounter truth.
A story doesn’t merely give listeners information. It asks them to enter an experience, recognize themselves or others within it, and consider what the story means to them.
In this way, fiction feels natural to me as both a writer and a Christian. I wanted readers not only to know Beth’s circumstances but also to walk beside her in them for a while.
Why I Became a Novelist
I could have written a nonfiction book about childhood abuse, neglect, silence, institutional failure, forgiveness, faith, and healing. There are already many such books out there.
Instead, I wanted my readers to know Beth, care about her, fear for her, and grow frustrated with those who fail her. I wanted them to recognize the ordinary heroes who help her, to hope with her, and to walk beside her.
Why?
Because once a reader cares about a character, the ideas cease to be abstract.
I’m not saying fiction is superior to memoir. They illuminate truth differently.
Memoir says, “This is what happened to me.”
Fiction says, “Walk beside someone and see what happens.”
Both matter.
But for this story, fiction was the form I knew I needed.
Why I Chose Fiction
If I had written a memoir, readers would have learned more about me and my experiences. By writing a novel, I could draw from my experiences, the experiences others shared with me, and my imagination. I hope that, in doing so, readers discover something about themselves.
Beth’s journey is fictional, but the questions aren’t.
We face them every day.
How do communities respond to vulnerable people? What happens when children aren’t believed? Can broken trust be rebuilt? Can forgiveness and boundaries coexist? Is there hope after profound grief and loss?
Those questions don’t belong only to me or to my story. They don’t belong only to Beth.
They belong to all of us.
That’s why I chose fiction. Not to escape reality, but to enter it from another direction and perspective.
I gave my experiences, and those others shared with me, to imagination, and imagination gave me Beth.
Her story isn’t mine.
But perhaps somewhere within it, my readers can recognize a little of themselves.
About What Remains After
Although What Remains After is a work of fiction, the emotions and questions at its heart come from a very real understanding of how childhood experiences can shape a person's life. Fiction allowed me to explore those truths through Beth Clark's story while giving her the freedom to become someone entirely her own. If you're curious about the novel that grew from this approach to storytelling, I invite you to explore What Remains After.
Note: What Remains After is a literary psychological suspense novel set in rural Alberta, exploring childhood trauma, faith, survival, truth-telling, and healing across two timelines. The novel is available now on Amazon in Canada and the United States. It’s also available online at Indigo and Barnes & Noble.
Blessings,
Pauline J. Grabia
Stories of Consequence
Fiction that faces the dark, but ends in light.
FAQs:
Is What Remains After based on a true story?
What Remains After is a work of fiction. Its characters, events, and setting are fictional, but some of the emotional truths beneath the story draw from experiences I understand personally, as well as observations, stories shared with me, and imagination.
Is Beth Clark based on Pauline J. Grabia?
No. Beth Clark is not a fictional version of me. She has her own history, family dynamics, personality, fears, strengths, and choices. Although I understand some of the emotions Beth experiences, her story is her own.
Why did you choose to write fiction instead of memoir?
Fiction gave me the freedom to move beyond the boundaries of my own biography. Instead of asking only, “What happened to me?” I could ask, “What might this mean for all of us?” It also allowed me to combine personal experience, the experiences others have shared with me, observations, questions, and imagination to create something new.
Can fiction be based on personal experience without being autobiographical?
Yes. Personal experiences can provide some of the emotional building blocks for fiction without making a novel autobiographical. A writer may understand emotions such as fear, betrayal, loneliness, hope, forgiveness, or resilience and use that understanding to create fictional characters whose circumstances are very different from the writer’s own.
How does fiction help readers connect with experiences different from their own?
Fiction invites readers to walk beside characters whose lives may be very different from theirs. Readers don't have to share a character's circumstances to recognize an emotion, struggle, or hope. As I write in the essay, “Fiction doesn’t ask, ‘Has this happened to you?’ It asks, ‘Have you ever felt something like this?’”
Related Posts:
If you’ve lived through difficult experiences, why invent characters? Why create Beth Clark rather than simply tell your own story?
I’ve been asked that question, and it’s a fair one. Memoir is a powerful way to convey a message. It preserves memories, bears witness to the truth, and allows someone to say, “This happened.” I could have written a memoir, but I chose a different path.