Writing Memoir to Fiction
Bestselling author Alex Messenger shares his journey from writing an acclaimed memoir to switching over to fiction.
In 2019 I published my first book, a nonfiction—memoir to be specific—about my surviving a grizzly bear attack. That story chronicled the worst moments of my life, everything leading up to it, and what happened afterward. To say that I was putting myself out there was an understatement.
I was putting everything out there, opening myself up and sharing some of those most traumatizing and sensitive moments to comments about how folks would have done this or that differently, to people who have the gift of hindsight, the perspective of words on a screen or the page or through audio, and not while facing off with an apex predator, or curling up in a tent. Hindsight, the whole picture. I was nervous about that, about becoming vulnerable by putting my trauma and experience out there in that way.
Still, it was worth it.
The book would go on to become a Wall Street Journal bestseller and finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards, among other accolades and recognition. I’ve received countless notes and comments from readers who told me how impactful my story was, and how much they appreciated that I’d shared it.
After publishing The Twenty-Ninth Day, I simultaneously knew that it wouldn’t be the last book I’d ever write, and that coming up with a way to follow that up was going to be a challenge. I wanted to pick up the next project as soon as I could, and I worked through various ideas and concepts. Still, I kept waiting for inspiration to strike.
It wasn’t long before I decided I might switch genres. I’d loved the experience of writing nonfiction. I still write nonfiction in my role as a marketing and communication professional with the University of Minnesota Duluth, and in a number of other capacities outside my vocational creative writing of books.
But I was excited by the possibility of applying my creative storytelling to something with more freedom and possibility. I was also thrilled by the idea of taking my broad set of experiences and tapping into them as inspiration instead of strictly as source material. My bear attack happened in 2005, and some five years later I went back to work in the woods at the same camp, to then guide kids on their own transformational experiences, and when it came time to switch careers, I soon picked back up in the wilderness through operations as a member of the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Rescue Squad, a volunteer search and rescue unit that operates in the far north of Minnesota.
I’ve been a member of that unit since 2013, helping people out of what is often the worst moments of their lives for over a decade. It’s been humbling, and incredible, with some of the most visceral memories I’ve had outside my bear attack. I’ve seen incredible joy and terrible heartbreak. I’ve been witness to some of the most amazing moments through my work with the Rescue Squad, but those are often stories that I don’t want to tell directly, inspirations that I’d mostly prefer to have separate from the finished product of entertainment, both out of respect for the families, and for victims, and because those are often not my stories to tell. So, as I’ve worked through these experiences, I’ve wondered how they might influence my creative writing. How might I take the raw, real, violent, gory things I’ve seen and worked with, and have them become realities in a fictitious story?
As I thought through these things and wondered what story to tell, in February 2021 we were paged to a water emergency. It was deep winter in northern Minnesota, and a large number of anglers were ice fishing on Lake Superior near where I live in Duluth, and just down the shore from where I was working. The ice floe they were standing on had broken from shore and was drifting into the lake. While I wasn’t able to respond to that call, I went down to the shore and watched as the last of our crew navigated along the miles of ice edge to check for stragglers that hadn’t yet made it to shore.
25 had already found solid ground, but one angler was left on the floe, and was walking across the enormous raft of ice to where he hoped it was still attached on the far shore. It wasn’t, and I watched as our airboat, masked by shimmering heat waves and flickering sea smoke on the sub-zero day, motored over and picked up this last sole fisherman from the ice. I stood in wonder at the possibilities of what would have happened if no one knew he was there. And that reality of this man being plucked from the ice, combined with the creative possibilities of fiction to become my debut novel that was released in March of this year: The Ice on the Lake.
I’ve integrated so much more of my experience in this book, but it’s been an incredible opportunity to fuse those memories with the possibilities of fiction, with the narrative freedom of bringing real human moments, and raw physicality of trauma together into a story that is both true, and possible, and completely fictional.
Check out Alex Messenger's The Ice on the Lake here:
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