Thought you might just like to see a sneak preview of my newsletter. If you’d like to receive it regularly, every Monday – it also has competition and submission info – and its free – just scroll down on the right and fill in the subscription form . This week its about the problem of writing successful fiction from personal experience.
‘….Before beginning to turn a particular personal experience into a story or a novel (so I’m not talking about memoir here) there are a few questions I think we could ask ourselves and which we should answer as honestly as we can. The kind of questions I’m thinking of are: is this story important/big enough to be turned into a novel? In other words is it more than an anecdote? Does it have significance to anyone outside of myself, my family and my friends? Will this story entertain, enthral, inspire, bring tears to the eye, or move people in other ways? And in the case of the novel: is the story actually long enough to sustain the interest of the reader for two or three or four hundred plus pages? In other words does the story have legs? Remember an incident, or experience that seems funny, tragic or profound to us may seem quite unimportant to others.
If we answer yes to enough of these questions… I think the next question we must ask is how can I make this into a fiction that carries a truth of its own?
Some ways of doing this and making the leap from memory and experience into fiction are:
• Change the names of your characters – if you do nothing else you should do this – or their gender, change their appearance, give them different habits, a different place or time in which to live, and let them take on a life of their own.
• Try not to dictate from the start what will happen, allow the novel or story to grow from the writing so that it can surprise you.
• Expand the scope of your story. Introduce some fictional characters and try to look for the story’s greater significance e.g. a story about a marriage in crisis might also be a story about a cultural or social divide, about bringing up teenagers, the generation gap, sickness, IVF, wealth, the new social media etc. etc.
• Don’t be afraid to lie. That’s right, make things up! – as long as they are true to the spirit of the story these are the things which will help you move away from actual events into the realm of fiction. You shouldn’t worry about this or feel you have to stick to the bald facts.
• Try to resist the temptation to include things which mean a lot to you personally but which are less interesting to the reader and don’t really fit the narrative. I know from experience how hard this is especially in a first novel.
In her essay On Keeping a Notebook (some great essays here) Joan Didion talks about the difference between truth and fiction. Although she’s discussing journal writing rather than fiction, her point is the same. She claims that the point of writing in a notebook is not to preserve an ‘accurate factual record.’
‘In fact I have abandoned altogether that kind of pointless entry: instead I tell what some would call lies. ‘That’s simply not true,’ the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. ‘The party wasn’t for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn’t that way at all.’ Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not have remembered the cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me.’
So definitely, definitely look for the cracked crab (I love crab we used to buy it fresh from Norwich market when we we were students ) but if possible use experience as a springboard and not the beginning and end of the whole caboodle.
Next week I’m afraid there will be no newsletter as I’m off to Weston-Super-Mare to help my father pack up his house and to move here to the North, where he’ll be nearer us. Hooray!
Love crab too – cracked or not! As a ‘fledgling’ writer, I have found trying to write fiction from true experience much the hardest thing. Sometimes, at first, it feels good because there is something ‘solid’ there to work with – similar to the difference between a blank page and one with a draft that needs editing – but I almost always find it limits my imagination in the end. Apart from concerns about offending people who may recognise themselves, it often feels as if that particular story has been told and can’t be changed. On the other hand, when I read back what I have written from the imagination, I invariably see the springboard from my own life although the story is of someone else in another world.
Love your insightful pieces. Thank you. Good luck with the move.
Hi Kelly, thanks so much for your insightful comment. I think what you say is so true – how in the first instance it feels like we have something solid to work from and of course the blank page can be very scary. But experience can limit it us – a story already ‘told that can’t be changed’ – yes I agree. Imagination is the thing – I sometimes think of it as ‘the leap into fiction.’ Good luck with your writing I look forward to reading a story or a novel by you someday (soon!). Avril
I would say that, writing from experience can be authentic, in a way that connects the reader and the writer. I would also say that, there is no middle ground. What I mean is, it works for me when, I write from experience, experience (perhaps I should say history), which, has lived with me long enough, that I have looked at it again many times over with new eyes. Or, in contrast, I find writing about something, a situation I’m immersed within, that doesn’t make sense, can also produce authentic results. The former is making the universal out of the particular. My own change in view to a specific person, place or situation, as I myself journey forth away from it, and review it as I change in time. The latter bring the particular into the foreground, by drawing on those universally understood feelings of fear, anger, love, hate et al, to bear upon a particular current experience. In my view, entertainment demands we make a loud enough noise that we intrude upon others with our message. Art, asks us to speak in such a way that people listen in because they want to intrude upon our ideas. It’s not about the particular versus the universal, entertaiinment versus art, one can show great artistry in entertainment, and one can be very entertaining in their art. My point is, the minute you report on a page a direct translation from life, all of these things are already in play, it’s our job as writers to harness the skills to manipulate these components as best we can.
Hi Warren – Great to hear from you – as always such interesting views – I do agree that experience is best viewed and written about from a long lens – I agree that time and distance make us see things with new/different eyes. I’m not sure about entertainement demanding a loud noise, perhaps I’d say the kind of noise to engage and entrance our readers. As fas as direct translation from life – isn’t that memoir?
The way I think about the philosophy of writing comes from two thinkers. The first Lacan, a French psychoanalysist and theoritican, who wrote about the point in which the child is able to recognise itself in the mirror. At the mirror stage, three things happen simulaneously. The child mis-inauguates it’s ego on self reflection, and thus to some degree mis-recognises itself. Also, simultaneously, the child realises it has a history- and projects a future. Is this not what we do when we write: mis-represent the present, totalise our past, and project our future (or, all of these things for our characters). Thus, memoirs, are at best a mis-representation of the present, and for the particular details of that I turn to saussure and semitoics, and the interpretation of the signifier and the signified which gives us the ‘sign’. This is most notable in translation, when the meaning of a word, not the actual word is translated. Could not each of us re-write something already written even in our own langague with different words, yet leave the reader with the same understood experience? Therefore, is it not the common experience of life but the common experience of mis-representing life that glides so easy into other word, minds and hearts. It’s the mechanism and structure that hold universal appeal, not the content. I read these thinkers long before I first wrote fiction, but the more I write, the more I see the symbolic lag which, is always the inescapable frosted glass between ourselves and the page, even when we think we’re recording experience as truthfully as we can. Hence, even when we are right on the money of noting what happened to us today- in so many ways we are so remote from it too.