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— How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
==AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION REQUIRES AS much research as any other kind of fiction, in my experience.
I bought books about sexual abuse, the predatory patterns of pedophiles, and a self-help book for survivors, which I needed more than I knew.
I bought a book about the flora and fauna of Maine in every season.
I took out my old sheet music from the choir.== Whether or not I could trust my memory, I was also writing across gaps, things I wouldn’t let myself remember.
While I had no choice except to invent my way forward, I relied on material that contained the facts I needed.
==I also bought a weathered copy of Aristotle’s Poetics at a library sale.== I don’t know for sure when I purchased it.
==All I know is that at some point, in deciding to address this need for story, for plot, and catharsis, I turned to Aristotle.
The book is remarkable for many reasons, including the pleasure to be found in reading Aristotle on tragedy, as if it has just been invented, speaking confidently about how no one knows the origins of comedy, but that probably it is from Sicily.== He notes that the root of “drama” is the Greek verb dran, which means “to do” or “to act,” and this became one of the most powerful insights for me.
==Memorable action is always more important to a story—action can even operate the way rhyme and meter do, as a mnemonic device.
You remember a story for what people did.== Tragedy is a representation of an action of a superior kind—grand, and complete in itself, presented in embellished language, in distinct forms in different parts, performed by actors rather than told by a narrator, effecting, through pity and fear, the purification of such emotions.
Here the text is footnoted: purification: ==the Greek word katharsis, which occurs only here in the Poetics, is not defined by Aristotle and its meaning is much controverted.
Pity and fear and grand action.
And purification.
This was what I was after.== I had reached for the right instructions.
==Reading Aristotle to learn how to structure a novel means reading at an angle==, almost at cross purposes, but I understood him all the same.
And rereading him now, I still thrill to his descriptions of beginning, middle, and end, or his casual mention, ==in the section on scale, of “an animal a thousand miles long—the impossibility of taking it all in at a single glance,” and understanding that, while he was speaking of scale in the story, this was, in a sense, what a novel was: a thought so long it could not be perceived all at once.== His assured way of saying that a story “built around a single person is not, as some people think, thereby unified” gave me an understanding of both, and what it meant with regard to his description of the way Homer “constructed the Odyssey, and the Iliad, too, around a single action”—of the grand kind—was for me like watching lightning.
==A single grand action unifies a story more than a single person, the characters memorable for the parts they play inside it.==