347. What is Autofiction and How to Write it, with Nick Berg

Author Nick Berg stops by to talk about the concept of autofiction, how it offers different opportunities than memoir, and how you can tell the truth through fiction.

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https://www.pnberg.com/

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https://www.pnberg.com/book-shadows-of-tehran/

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Transcript

Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the author-focused podcast that takes a whole-person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. Today we're taking an in-depth look at my favorite nonfiction genre, autofiction. It takes real-life events, experiences, and memories and blends them with fiction without ever losing sight of the core truths and emotional landscape. Author Nick Berg is here to tell us what autofiction is and what it isn't, how he wrote about it, and how it can sometimes lead us to a deeper understanding than the facts alone.

Jennia: Well, first, thank you so much for being here this morning!

Nick Berg: Thank you so much, Jennia! I'm really happy to be here.

Jennia: I'm happy to have you here too! So how would you define autofiction?

Nick Berg: I would say autofiction is telling the core emotional truth of a story. And not necessarily all the events and the people are lined up as it would in a memoir, but it's more of a telling the emotional side of things and the emotional core of the story.

Jennia: Yeah, I agree. What would you say to someone who argues that this genre should be considered purely fiction?

Nick Berg: Well, it could be at some points, but the way I look at it is that when you're trying to write it as a—write a memoir, you're basically recounting events.

Jennia: Mhm.

Nick Berg: And when you recount the events, as a human being— I don't care who you are as a human being—we try to, basically, justify our actions— 

Jennia: Yeah.

Nick Berg: — and talk about why a person—why [they] did that or why this person did that. And that's a trap that everybody, anybody that writes a memoir falls into because they're talking about themselves. And we have a tendency not to want to talk about our mistakes and we want to talk about all of our victories. But when you write a book as an autofiction the character is not you. So you're not talking about yourself, and you have this ability to tell the truth and not justify it and not be able— Because you're not talking about yourself, you're just telling a story.

Jennia: Yes!

Nick Berg: That's one piece of it. The other side of it is, is that when you're dealing with trauma, when you're dealing with very difficult subjects— 

Jennia: Mhm.

Nick Berg: — there's things that you don't want to talk about it in the first person type of a— 

Jennia: Right.

Nick Berg: And when you talk about it in a third person, you're basically separating it from yourself and you can talk about it much easier in that process.

Jennia: Yes! I just read a thesis the other day. It was talking about memoirs as graphic novels and that sort of thing, but I think it applies here too. And one of the lines is that it makes the inexpressible, expressible. 

Nick Berg: Right.

Jennia: And that just really stuck with me, and I thought about this even leading up to this interview. But yeah, that step back, that bit of distance from it, you're no longer analyzing the self, you're analyzing someone who might be close to the self or experienced similar things as a self, but it's still not purely identifiable as you.

Nick Berg: Right, exactly. And that's the thing. When I was writing Shadows of Tehran— Shadows of Tehran is a pretty traumatic book, I would say that. There's a lot of events in there that are pretty traumatic events. So I had to basically stop at some moments— 

Jennia: Ahh.

Nick Berg: — walk away, think about it, on how I wanted to express those emotions and part of that. And the core of autofiction is that. And you can't compromise the emotional side of it. If you do that, then it's pure fiction. The emotional side of it and how people felt, and how you felt, and how you saw the events happening, that's the part that you have to be true about. The rest of it—places, people, all of that—those can be different. But the emotional core is something that you have to stay through with. And this is something where other people asked me about autofiction and I'm telling them, yeah, you can write autofiction, but you have to stay true to the core emotional side of it. Because if you don't, your readers would know it, and most importantly, you would know it.

Jennia: Yeah, and that does feel more like a lie than when you omit a person from being present or you combine two real-life people into a real person because it's going to be that emotional perception and feeling that you have that probably has the most impact on you. Not what that person's name was, or where you were when the event occurred, or any of those other things.

Nick Berg: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The other thing I would say about autofiction that kind of is important to me, is that there is a bunch of characters and people that never asked to be in a book (Jennia laughs). And so (laughs)— 

Jennia: (both laughing) There's that too.

Nick Berg: So you want— This is kind of to protect the innocent (Jennia laughs) in the process. And you can talk about them in a different context and a different perspective without really losing the core story in that process. And you can bring in and kind of put things together in a different way.

Jennia: That is an excellent point, yes.

Nick Berg: And then there is things that, in a real life, when you look at the events and the things that are happening, it's messy. Real life is really messy— 

Jennia: Yes!

Nick Berg: — Things don't develop the way you want it. But when you write it as an autofiction, fiction requires a structure. It requires character building. It requires you to have a structure to that story and have arcs and downs and ups and all of that stuff. And I see that as a strength, actually— 

Jennia: Mhm.

Nick Berg: — in that process. Because what it did for me is that it focused me to write the characters and all of that and really pay attention to the story in a way that I wonder what's the message that I'm trying to say versus just recounting of the events, and this is what happened and that's what happened. So it forces me into the message of the book and the core emotional side of the book versus "Oh, this happened, this happened, this happened." And it might not be as much related at that moment, but the structure of fiction really helped me put the core messages together.

Jennia: Yeah. I want to just go back very quickly to their people—especially people, and places, and whatever that did not give you permission to include them. Because that is something we see with memoir where we do have to be very cautious about how we're presenting somebody else or even if it's a coded version of who that person is, but they can still pick up, yes, I'm actually Uncle Henry in this book, even though it's Aunt Jane.

Nick Berg: Right.

Jennia: The sort of feelings that come up about that and even the rifts you can have in those relationships in real life just because you've included them or having to be aware of that too. So I really like that you brought that up because you avoid a lot of that when you use autofiction instead.

Nick Berg: Right, exactly. You can avoid that. You can bring it—make them into a different context. You can, instead of an uncle, they could be a friend. You're still telling the same story. You're not hurting the core aspect of the story. But when you write it as a memoir, in a memoir, people expect for every line to be true (laughs)— 

Jennia: Yes, exactly!

Nick Berg: — and exactly what happened.

Jennia: Right. They don't expect some made up character or a stand in who's a proxy for so and so. If you say this third grade teacher is the one who really inspired me, people are probably gonna go back and see, well, which third grade teacher did you have and who was it? And (laughs)— 

Nick Berg: Right.

Jennia: — your third grade teacher might pick the book up and think, oh, this is clearly about me then.

Nick Berg: Right, exactly. But the autofiction, I can say it was my high school teacher versus my third grade teacher and— 

Jennia: Right. Or a next door neighbor or just some guy you sat next to on a train (laughs).

Nick Berg: Yeah, exactly. Because the important part is the influence on how it impacted the main character of the book.

Jennia: So when you started writing this, did you always plan on using autofiction as your genre or did you ever go back and forth a bit?

Nick Berg: I did. I always wanted to write this as autofiction. And the thing is, when you talk about people with trauma, people from places that— I still have family in Iran— 

Jennia: Ohh.

Nick Berg: — And I have a lot of family in Iran, all the friends in Iran. So I didn't want to write it as a memoir because it would impact their lives.

Jennia: Mhm.

Nick Berg: When people that come from countries that are under real restrictions and things like that— So I had to escape from Iran and come to the U.S. and all of the parts in the book that I talk about, all of the activities in Iran and all of that stuff, most of it is true. So I didn't want to put them in jeopardy either. So when you come from those backgrounds, it's very different on how you write it. Plus my military experience and the military parts in there, I couldn't talk about all of the things— 

Jennia: Ohh, right.

Nick Berg: — I did in the military, so I had to write it as fiction.

Jennia: Do you have any tips for someone else who might be debating over whether they should write more of a traditional memoir or choose autofiction fiction?

Nick Berg: I would say they have to think about really deeply on what the message of the book [is], why they're writing the book. And if it is something to talk about all of their experiences, it probably should be a memoir. If they want to write the emotional core of the book, you can't capture that in a memoir because people expect it to be a structure of events. But if somebody's thinking that maybe autofiction is a lie, I wouldn't think that. Because that's what a lot of people think about—that autofiction is a lie. But autofiction is not really a lie. It's just that you put structure into real life, and you['re] kind of putting that together in a different way.

Jennia: Yes! And I think we see that especially where autofiction is used in a way that's more metaphorical or like a past guest we had on and we talked about using myth within autofiction. So yeah, it all goes back to that same thing you said—you're getting to that emotional core. And really that is going to be the piece that holds it all together and that reveals these truths about you and what happened.

Nick Berg: Right, absolutely.

Jennia: Yeah, the structure itself is almost, I don't want to say "negligible," but (both laugh) how about flexible?

Nick Berg: Flexible, yeah, that's a better word for it (laughs).

Jennia: I also want to talk about the importance of giving your main character a name that was different from your own and how this helped you take that step back.

Nick Berg: Yeah, actually the name of the main character, it took me a while to come up with the name. I actually had to go through, like, five different names until I came up with that— 

Jennia: Really? (Nick laughs)

Nick Berg: — with the last one. And talking to friends and family and all of them about the main character's name— Because in Shadows of Tehran, it's a really strange name. And the reason I'm saying it's a strange name is because the main character's father is American, the mother is Iranian, and he grows up in Iran. And there's nobody in Iran named Ricardo, so (laughs) And growing up— My actual first name is Pedro— 

Jennia: Oh!

Nick Berg: — And growing up in Iran with the name like Pedro and the last name Berg, which is kind of Jewish. But I'm not Jewish—and my dad was a Jew, he was German. But growing up with the name like Pedro Berg in Iran, it was kind of really strange, to say the least. And going to school, all my teachers were like, "What?" looking at the list, the name of students like, "Who is that?" And it was really strange. So coming up with the name of the character, I needed to come up with something that represents that identity and how that identity felt. So I came up with Ricardo Rosen. And the Rosen part is because it's kind of a Jewish name but not really Jewish. Because there was impacts—emotional impacts of that name throughout the life around that. There's one line in there is that, "Oh, I'm glad to meet the only Spanish Jewish guy in Tehran that's neither Spanish nor Jewish." And that's actually was what happened when I met— 

Jennia: Ahh, yes!

Nick Berg: — this person, that was the comment that they made. So it's that whole process of coming up with a name that actually represents the events rather than just the name.

Jennia: (laughs) Just out curiosity, what were some of the disgarded names?

Nick Berg: Uh, so one was Carlos. I don't remember the other ones because I didn't mull on them too long. Carlos was actually— I went through, like, halfway through the book with the name Carlos before I changed it. And then there was Ben. But then I realized that didn't really represent what I was trying to put on there, so.

Jennia: When you were about halfway through, what made you to say that Carlos just was not going to be the name that was really going to work for you and what you were getting across about yourself?

Nick Berg: Actually I met a few people that I was talking to that their name were Carlos. And I'm looking at them, I'm like, "Yeah, no, I don't think so. That doesn't fit" (both laugh). I don't know why. It was just a— 

Jennia: Yeahh, yeah!

Nick Berg: — emotional thing at the moment (both laugh).

Jennia: I guess I can see that and just seeing a real-life Carlos and thinking, "Maybe I don't really fit the Carlos look"— 

Nick Berg: Yeah, exactly! (both laugh)

Jennia: Well, so how much of his character is a reflection of yourself, and how much of it is something completely new to the fictionalized or semi-fictionalized version?

Nick Berg: I think the character is 100 percent myself.

Jennia: Ohh.

Nick Berg: Or at least 99.9 percent of it is a reflection.

Jennia: Which would be good even for memoir, really (laughs).

Nick Berg: Yeah, yeah. So, it's a— But writing it, it was always a third person. So I had a writing coach that helped me write the book.

Jennia: Ohh, okay!

Nick Berg: And I talk about it all the time because English is my third language. So English not being my primary language—and I never went to school for English to learn the grammar, the structure of the sentences, and all of that stuff. And plus, I'm not a full-time author, I work in tech. And so I didn't have the time to go and try to learn how to write a story. And I know there's a lot of work that comes along with that to do that. So I used the writing coach—his name is Ken Scott. He's a London Times bestseller— 

Jennia: Oh, awesome!

Nick Berg: — I basically asked him if he would help me write the book. So I would write the chapter, send it to him, he would edit them, send them back to me and say, "This is what you should look like, what you're trying to say here." And he would make changes to it. And then I had editors that went through the book as well, three or four times, actually. But the key part of it is that when I would talk to him, when I talked to Ken about the book and the character, on Zoom calls and things like that, I always refer them to him as Ricardo— 

Jennia: Ahh!

Nick Berg: — And we always talked about Ricardo, that that's Ricardo— And he would ask me— A couple of times he asked me, he said, "You understand that you're talking about yourself, right?" I'm like, "Yeah, but in the context of this book, I can't talk—this can't be me. It has to be Ricardo that we're talking about here."

Jennia: Mhm. Did he ever have any commentary about that, about why he agreed with that?

Nick Berg: He kind of understood because he had written three or four books for people that come from that kind of a background. He'd written one book called, Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? And— 

Jennia: Oh, I think I've heard of that.

Nick Berg: — it was the book about a Holocaust survivor. And— 

Jennia: Mhm. Yeah, yeah, I've heard of that one.

Nick Berg: Yeah. So he was very focused on— And he kind of understood. That's why I picked him. Because he kind of understood the genre and what I was trying to convey in there.

Jennia: Yeah. Which is so helpful. But I also like that you're sharing that this isn't just this one-person process, even with writing. Because I think so often we think about the writing being a solitary activity. And then it's only once you are done with that draft that you engage other professionals, like an editor, or maybe beta readers, or a publicist. And that a writing coach can sometimes be the person you need to really bring it all together and get it to the point that it's ready for those other professionals to come in.

Nick Berg: Exactly.

Jennia: So during all of this distancing and using a different name, was there anything that surprised you that you learned about yourself, or maybe a new interpretation you had of past experiences because of this?

Nick Berg: Yes, a lot, actually. There was a lot of that. I had to really sit there and think about a lot of the things as I was kind of watching Ricardo go through each of these processes. And that's how I kind of looked at it. I was watching Ricardo— It's kind of like a movie replay[ing] in my head, watching Ricardo kind of go through each of these stages and these types of things. And at the time when you're going through this in life, you don't really think about it, especially in the process, because it was all about survival.

Jennia: Yes.

Nick Berg: It was all about getting to the next stage and moving forward to it. But then when you sit back and start looking at it from that perspective, I was like, "Oh my god, that's a lot" (both laugh)

Jennia: Mhm, yes (laughs).

Nick Berg: I was kind of telling myself, wow, you went through a lot of stuff. And I had my therapist that worked with me at the same time as well. So I had a lot of support writing this book between my writing coach and my therapist. And I would kind of go and relive some of these events with my therapist. And she would kind of tell me, "Oh, you should really think about this part. You should really analyze this emotion of what you had in this process and what you were thinking during that time."

Jennia: Mhm. No, yeah. I think that is so, so true about—what you said about being in survival. We have this very narrow viewpoint. We're just looking at that sidewalk or that path right in front of us and nothing else. And then only with that distancing or time do we get that broader perspective where we can now sort of look out and see everything that was going on around you and all the different circumstances and the context of it. And how that context applied to what was happening to you and being able to come to an analysis of what was occurring and not just based on your own viewpoint or your own emotional reaction to it.

Nick Berg: Right, exactly. It's kind of— The way I kind of explain this process is kind of like when you're driving down the road, you can only see so far ahead of you.

Jennia: (laughs) Yes!

Nick Berg: Then when you take a drone and you go up and look at it from that, then you really understand how windy and difficult that road might be (laughs) in that process.

Jennia: Yes! That's— I love that comparison. So I just recently was on a trip and I was thinking the same thing. Like, as you go higher and higher up in a building, you're looking down when you're down there on the street and all you can focus on is your immediate surroundings and what's happening to you right now. But then, yeah, if you're up on, like, the 12th floor, the 15th floor, or whatever, looking down and you're seeing that this person who might be annoyed by the congestion or is annoyed by this noise, that there are reasons for it, they're not personal or not meant to be there for your annoyance. That— 

Nick Berg: Right.

Jennia: — yeah, it's just part of this bigger picture that you're not even aware of. And, yeah, you just need that broader perspective in order to take it all in.

Nick Berg: Exactly. So writing the book was that broader perspective— And it actually changed my life. I started looking at things very differently after finishing this book.

Jennia: Can you share one of the ways you looked at life differently as a result?

Nick Berg: You know, I was really focused on a lot of the wrong things, [I'll] say it that way. And once I wrote the book and I kind of realized that it kind of changed my perspective of where I want to go for the rest of my life and how I want to operate in the rest of my life. And the things that were important before the book were no longer important after the book. And it really changed— Because no matter what you go through, when you go through life on a day-to-day basis, again, you're only focused on the things you gotta— I gotta go to work, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And you don't take that retrospective moment to kind of look at it and say, "Yeah, that's how my life was." And if I'm looking at it from 30,000-foot level to what happened, what am I missing in the future that I'm not looking at it from that 30,000-foot level?

Jennia: Right! Or what are you— 

Nick Berg: — Or what I would would do—  If I were to change some things over there, do I want to change some things over here?

Jennia: Mhm. Yeah, I was thinking that too. Or even what you might have been blocking yourself off to this whole time, but it's something you want. And it's not until you're able to take that, again, distanced viewpoint, where you're no longer justifying your own actions and reactions and being able to look at it more analytically or without personal bias, where you want to pose yourself as the hero and say, okay, so here's where I'm in my own way (laughs).

Nick Berg: Yes, exactly. That's a really good point that you brought up, is that in the book writing the character, the protagonist, I didn't want Ricardo to come across as a hero. Because he wasn't a hero. He made mistakes, and I wrote those mistakes in the book.

Jennia: Ahh.

Nick Berg: I wrote those regrets into the book. I wanted to be a true human story because all of us in life may have made mistakes. I don't care who you are, you have made mistakes. You have at some point told a lie or two or done something that you're not so very proud of. And writing that character, I wanted to make sure those points came across as well. Ricardo is not a hero. Ricardo is a normal person, just been given—dealt a really bad hand from the beginning of his life and he just had to deal with it.

Jennia: Well, did you read any other works of autofiction for inspiration or guidance?

Nick Berg: Not really autofiction. I was reading a lot of— So my hero, I would say (both laugh), from writing is Jane Gardam. I don't know if you ever read any of her works. And she has written, like, 40 books and she's phenomenal— And I know her son really well— 

Jennia: Ohh.

Nick Berg: — and she just passed away, like, three months ago at the age of 97. So her work was really inspirational to me because the way she creates characters and the way she talks about just ordinary people and make those ordinary people interesting, it was really inspiring to me.

Jennia: Yeah, I can see that being inspiring. Yeah. And then why do you think that we're seeing an increased reader interest in autofiction as a genre?

Nick Berg: I really didn't know that part (both laugh)

Jennia: Surprise! (both laughing)

Nick Berg: Yeah. But the thing is, is that I just wanted to write this story and I think people are resonating with it because it's a lot—autofiction is a lot more emotional than memoirs. Because when you write the memoir, people kind of put you on a pedestal that you have— Oh, there's this great person that came across this and done this and climbed Mount Everest and something like that. But when you're writing autofiction, you're not really boosting your own ego in the process. You're telling the story

Jennia: Well, and finally, are there any fictionalized moments in the book that you wish had been part of your reality?

Nick Berg: No, I don't think so. The Ricardo character, I tried to stay true as much as possible as I could, in the process. And a lot of the events and stuff have changed, especially the military ones. I had to change a lot of it—places, names, all of that. Most of it is pretty accurate, I would say.

Jennia: Well, before we end, you mentioned there might be a book two or three. Is that (sic) anything you can share about those?

Nick Berg: Yeah, absolutely. So I will finish Ricardo's story in book two, because there's a really big cliffhanger at the end of book two (meaning "one"). And that wasn't intentional. It's just that when I started writing that—writing the book, it just became too big. And if I wanted to tell the whole story it would have been probably a War and Peace.

Jennia: (both laughing) Yes!

Nick Berg: I just couldn't fit it all in one book. That's what it really— And if you look at the pace of the book, the book is pretty fast paced. So I've crammed as much as I could in the first book (Jennia laughs), but I just couldn't finish it in that. So I'm gonna finish the story in the second book. And the third book is actually going to be a prequel— 

Jennia: Oh!

Nick Berg: — because my dad is American, and he left Iran when I was 7 years old. And I didn't find him until 35 years later— 

Jennia: Oh wow.

Nick Berg: — in Las Vegas. And come to find out my dad was a CIA agent his whole life (Jennia laughs). And so and he passed away a couple years ago. So I spent about three weeks with him before he passed away, writing all of his stories and recording all of his stories of how he became through all of this process. And he was a very unemotional person, the best way I can describe him. And, like, one of the questions my sister asked him is that—because we found out we have some half-brothers and half-sisters all over the world—my sister asked him, said, "Why did you have so many women in your life and have kids?" He said, "Well, for the work that I did, having a family was the best cover." So— 

Jennia: (stunned) Oh my gosh.

Nick Berg: Yeah (both laugh). I recorded his stories. And so the third book is gonna be his story.

Jennia: Okay, I have to read it (both laugh). I am 100 percent sold (so is Jennia's assistant) (both laugh more). Well, thank you again so much for being here today.

Nick Berg: Thank you so much! I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me on your show!

Jennia: Aww, you're welcome!

Jennia: And thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for additional information, including all of Nick's links. And if you enjoyed today's episode, I'd appreciate it if you could rate or review this podcast on Apple or Spotify. Thanks again!