When I first started writing fiction, I wrote stories as far from my own reality as possible. I’d had a fairly difficult childhood. We moved from Hong Kong to New York City when I was a small child and started living in a roach-infested flat that did not have a central heating system. There was ice on the inside of our window panes throughout the bitter winters. We kept the oven on day and night to have a bit of warmth. My family started working at a dust-filled garment factory in Chinatown and even though I was only five years old, I went with them every day after school to help as well. As soon as I learned to read in English, I loved books, both for what I could learn from them and because they were a way for me to escape the hard reality I knew. Like my heroine in my debut novel Girl in Translation, I had a talent for school and soon found myself living a double life: good student by day and factory worker by night.

Years later, I found myself studying at Harvard University and it was there that I made the decision to become a writer. My first stories were rooted in the escapism that I had enjoyed as a child. I wanted relief from my past, not to revel in it. The feedback I received was strikingly similar. I was told I had a gift for language and metaphor, yet the reader was left feeling bereft of deeper emotion. The worst thing was, I felt dissatisfied with my work as well. It was as if I were circling around something I could not reach.

That all changed when I began to write more directly from my own life. People told me they were gripped by my stories, that they laughed and cried. I understood that for me, my writing functions best when its emotional heart is true. However, that doesn’t mean that I can simply record the facts of my life and that would make compelling reading. I learned this when I tried to write my first novel. I discarded draft after draft, trying to pull fact and fiction together into some sort of cohesive whole.

In interviews, I’m often asked why I wrote a novel instead of a memoir. There are two reasons. The first is that I never wanted to talk about my background. Most children who work in factories grow up to be adults who work in factories. I was thrilled to have found a new life and the last thing I wanted to do was to reminisce about the sweat and hard labor of my childhood. However, as soon as the book was published, it received so much international attention. People wanted to know if it was possible for working-class immigrants in America to live the way we had. I realized it was an important part of the message of my book to stand up and say, “Yes.”

The second reason I wrote a novel instead of a memoir was my hope to create a book that people would not be able to put down. I wanted readers to be drawn into the story even as they learned about new cultures and worlds. To build this combination of enlightenment and entertainment, I needed to experiment with story, language and structure in the book. I learned a great deal of craft. I had to go beyond the boundaries of a simple retelling of my life story. Although the emotional heart of the book remained unchanged, I learned to rework the autobiographical material into something new.

Not only was my debut novel semi-autobiographical but my second novel, which I’ve finished, is based upon my own life as well. I worked as a professional ballroom dancer for a few years in between my degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and this new book is drawn from that experience.

I don’t believe that all writers need to explore autobiographical material. The simple regurgitation of a life story is often more sleep-inducing than anything else. I only know that for me, I produce my best work when I’m involved in exploring an issue that has true meaning for me. That forms the turbulent, exhilarating, living heart of the story. Then I take the events from my life that I have been unable to forget and I shake them lose from myself. I throw them far enough from reality that I can handle them as raw material again. I add a dose of imagination to seal it all together. I shape this clay around the emotional core, and in the end, that is what I call writing.

Emily Cleaver

Emily Cleaver is Litro's Online Editor. She is passionate about short stories and writes, reads and reviews them. Her own stories have been published in the London Lies anthology from Arachne Press, Paraxis, .Cent, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, One Eye Grey, and Smoke magazines, performed to audiences at Liars League, Stand Up Tragedy, WritLOUD, Tales of the Decongested and Spark London and broadcasted on Resonance FM and Pagan Radio. As a former manager of one of London’s oldest second-hand bookshops, she also blogs about old and obscure books. You can read her tiny true dramas about working in a secondhand bookshop at smallplays.com and see more of her writing at emilycleaver.net.

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