Every story I have ever written began with something that actually happened. Not a plot, not a character arc — a moment. A feeling I could not put down.
I grew up in New York City. I left for the forest in upstate New York. Both places live inside me in a way that no amount of time or distance has changed. When I write, I am pulling from that geography — not just the streets and the trees, but what it felt like to be a person moving through them.
That is what literary fiction does that other forms cannot. It insists on the texture of experience. It refuses to simplify the way people actually feel.
The Difference Between Story and Report
There is a question every writer who draws from life has to answer: when does memory become fiction?
For me, the answer came during a writing session that started as discipline and became something I did not expect. I was writing a scene — a boy in a New York neighborhood making a choice that would define who he became. The scene was rooted in something real. Something I had lived through, or watched, or felt at the edges of.
And then it stopped being memory and started being story.
That is the moment I understood the difference. Memory is what happened. Fiction is what it meant — pulled out of the specific and made available to every reader who has ever stood at a crossroads they did not ask for.
Fiction is what memory looks like when you stop trying to be accurate and start trying to be true.
Why Technical Precision Matters in Literary Work
I spent over twenty years as a technical writer before I published my first novel. Some people find that surprising. I find it essential.
Technical writing taught me that clarity is a form of respect. Every sentence has a job. Ambiguity costs the reader something — their time, their trust, their willingness to keep going. When I apply that discipline to fiction, I end up with prose that does not waste a word.
Literary fiction can be beautiful and precise at the same time. The two are not in tension. They are, I believe, deeply related.
What This Blog Is For
This is a place where I write about craft, about the publishing journey, about the particular challenges of turning lived experience into stories that resonate with readers who have never lived your life.
If you are an aspiring author, I hope it helps you move. If you are a reader, I hope it deepens what you already love about literary fiction.
Either way — I am glad you are here.
— Elan Wasabara
