Is My Name Tag False?!

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to attend the San Francisco Writers Convention. It was an entertaining sight - hundreds of slightly-hunched, pale-faced, sloppily-dressed, crooked-fingered writers lurching from session to session on how to write dialog, how to find an agent and how to leave your room and interact with the outside world in general. Questions ranged from "How do I submit a manuscript?" to "I'm writing about mushrooms. Who should my protagonist be?" It was a unique circus.

The first day, the conference organizer worked the registration line and asked everyone what they were writing. When he came to me, I said, "A historical narrative about the Gold Rush," to which he replied, "There's a lot to be mined there!" to which I replied back, "Very nice."

(My sales pitch got better as the conference went on. Eventually I was able to say:

"When Ah Toy's husband whisks her from China to strike gold in California, she thinks she has it made. But when he dies en route, she learns to fight loneliness and an envious Chinatown boss to survive and thrive as the first Chinese brothel madam in wild Gold Rush San Francisco."

A little better, right?)

I checked in and picked up my name tag. My name was there, and underneath it read, "Nonfiction" (as in, "His name really is Noel! It's no fiction!). There was my genre, branded and seared for everyone to see - editors, agents, publishers - and I felt a surge of pride that I really knew what I was doing.

But I was there to learn, so I started asking questions. At one panel of nonfiction publishers, I asked on a whim, "How much of the scenes and dialog can I speculate? How much can I invent and have it still be considered nonfiction?"

"Be careful," was the reply. "You want to stick to the facts."

"Real or alternative?" I wondered.

Later, I had a one-on-one session with an editor. I asked the same question. How much can I create?

"Minimal," she said.

"Hmm," I replied. I thought back to my first draft of Ah Toy's story and tried to estimate how much I conjured out of thin air. "I may have done more than that."

"In that case, how about turning it into historical fiction? People love that stuff."

"Historical fiction?"

"Yes."

"Fiction?"

"Yes."

I looked down. "But my name tag doesn't say that."

I spent the rest of the conference in a haze. Have I been wrong this whole time? I proudly consider myself a historian, one with a Bachelor's and Master's in History and who has taught high school American history. With the sudden possibility of "fiction" attached to my name, who was I now? How should I pitch the story to agents? What should I tell my History professors? What should I say to my family and friends?

Here's my problem. There are many historical references to Ah Toy and her rival Norman Ah-Sing, but not enough to detail their day-to-day lives. So I started inserting some educated speculations to fill in the gaps and make the story read more like a novel. But I kind of did that a lot. I have full chapters of speculated dialog and plot. In a sense I've trapped myself on a fence, fiction on one side and nonfiction on the other. Agents care about these labels because they guide them how to sell a book to publishers. Publishers care because they guide them how to market it.

So, I could jump to the fiction side but that involves rewriting a large portion of the book. Additionally, an agent told me, "You may have trouble getting a deal if the publisher sees you as a white man trying to write in the voice of a Chinese woman." Plus, there's already a historical fiction based on Ah Toy's life.

Or I could jump to the nonfiction side to avoid that, but that means more researching and, again, rewriting a large portion of the book. And I may have already tapped that research well dry.

What to do, what to do.

At this point I'm not sure which side to jump to. I'm leaning toward nonfiction but I need the story to be compelling enough, so I think I have to revisit my outline and see if there's enough of an interesting true story there to go that route. If not, maybe I need to change my name tag.

But will anyone recognize me?!

(Thoughts and suggestions eagerly invited.)