Selling stories as 'true' memoirs

The post about writing with a specific market in mind makes me wonder
if other story writers ever tried bypassing the ever-diminishing mainstream
literary fiction market altogether, and selling their stories as nonfiction
'memoir' or 'confessional' type pieces for nonfiction markets.

My current reigning model for this idea is Elizabeth Gilbert, whose
knack for turning fiction into magazine feature is just about
unparalleled---her 'memoir' in GQ about working at an NYC redneck bar I
cite here as the great modern exemplar of the form.

http://elizabethgilbert.com/

http://www.coyoteuglysaloon.com/101/gq01.html

These confessionals might be only suited to a certain kind of writer and a
certain kind of writing---the reader is always going to assume that you're
the narrator. Hunter Thompson was good at it, and filled this niche
completely, although the compromise it required killed him in the end.

You can deflect it from your own life by writing a third-person 'account' of
something, or turning an anecdote into a character sketch as like a
Stephen Leacock or James Agate essay, but I've found that this extra
stipulation of nonfiction 'disguise' can also add another hurdle---when
you just want to write straightforward, dramatic short stories, there's
only so much disguising and recasting as journalistic articles before
the production falls apart beneath the fake scenery and schnozz
glasses, and I end up wondering what I'm doing trying to write a story
in the voice of a memoir on my personal health that will appear to the
world as a feature in the Saturday Evening Post or whatever.

Jamesaritchie said:

I'm not sure what you mean.

Click to expand...

I'm glad you replied because it was a post of yours on this very topic (link below) that got me thinking on this in the first place.

For context, this was in a debate on the lack of decently-paying short story markets. When you said that you sold a lot of work to magazines, someone said that the magazines you mentioned were for nonfiction. To which you replied,

Yes, the magazines I listed are nonfiction. But I sold them fiction, just as many other writers do. I'll let you in on a trade secret. . .not all the "nonfiction" out there is nonfiction. Particularly humorous "nonfiction." Just because a piece doesn't have "Short Story" under the title does not mean that piece is nonfiction. Some of it is fiction. A lot of it is fiction.

Click to expand...

That's exactly what I'm interested in. Especially because in my experience, the number of nonfiction magazines that pay well (and that are open to new writers) are plentiful, while the number of well-paying outlets for the traditional short story are almost entirely gone.

The problem I'm trying to deal with is that I've found a paying niche for myself in nonfiction, I've been steadily at it for a while, but I haven't been able to replicate that success by selling the work that I actually care about, which is fiction.

You said that what you do is sell short stories to nonfiction markets that aren't billed as fiction. I'd like to know how that works. Are you talking about writing humorous or slice-of-life 'memoir' pieces along the lines of what I mention above, or are you talking about something else?

I'd also like to know if anyone else does this.


http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1013364&postcount=184