On truth in fiction

Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, Mass.

Over at Beth Kephart Books, the Dangerous Neighbors author posed the question "Truth or Fiction: Does It Matter When The Lines Get Blurred?"

For me, this is a particularly interesting question to consider, as my "fiction" is generally infused with a lot of "truth." Particularly seeing as I'm working on a new novel -- finally! -- which is the product of my experiences, those of friends, and fiction. A compost project, really. It took me a year and half since writing my last novel to come up with an idea I felt confident in.

And while Chris has said to me that he's a better fiction writer because he's much more imaginative -- which is true; he can come with anything -- I don't think that being as strongly inspired by real life makes me a bad writer. The fact of the matter is, like Kephart wrote, "The only interesting life, on the page, is the shaped life, the contemplated one, the one sifted for meaning and insight."

To be able to combine real life experiences with fictional elements in a way that gives them shape makes me, I think, at least a good fiction writer. I hope that I'm great, but I'll leave that up to the public to decide.



Kephart poses this question, too: "But don't we have an obligation, nonetheless, to get it all as right as we can get it—to not deliberately work beyond the ken of what we believe happened?" If your aim is to write fiction, you can change "real life" as much as you'd like, I say.

Robin Hemley, author of the book Turning Life Into Fiction, stands by the belief that memoir -- the strict truth of real life -- is different from fiction. He states that the reading public expects memoir to be based on real life. Sure, the writer of memoir might need to recreate dialogue and shape the events of his or her life so that there is a strong narrative, but he's not supposed to take creative license with the order of events or characters.

But in writing fiction,  you can take creative license over those things. You can tell the story how you want to. 

I started writing the short story "Urgent Care," which was recently published by Fresh! Literary Magazine, after visiting the ER because I thought I'd broken my foot. The story starts with a pretty detailed description of what was the room I actually sat in while waiting on a diagnosis.

But the character sitting in that room in my story is experiencing boyfriend trouble -- something I was not experiencing when I broke my foot. In fact, the boyfriend trouble she has -- she said something mean and she's afraid it's going to cost her the love of her boyfriend -- is very similar to a situation one of my best friends experienced a few months ago.

In the end, I combined experiences from my life and that of my friend with fictional elements to create the story, one which I grow prouder of each time I read it again.

No one reading that story, if I hadn't divulged the details of its creation here, would know that it's based on real life in at least some ways. Hopefully, they would read it and even if they couldn't relate,  would be able to sympathize and come away from the story with some kind of knowledge about the nature of relationships.

In fact, when it comes to characters based on people the writer knows in "real life," the fact of the matter is it's so hard for an outsider to completely recreate a person's internal life. What we think we know about the people around us is only ever the tip of the iceberg. Hemley wrote in his book about instances where writers have written about real people -- as least as they see those persons -- the real, live people didn't recognize themselves in the work.

All of this brings me to another point: There's a difference between real life and truth in writing. Yes, real life has truth, but any story written about human beings is bound to have some truth. As anyone who has had a conversation about things they were going through with friends who replied with similar stories knows, the human experience is pretty universal.

Any time a writer writes about human characters, they're touching upon some true aspect of the human experience. Everyone I've ever met has experienced a broken heart or some other disappointment, everyone has had one moment where things just felt perfect, everyone has struggled with something.

Those aren't things that a writer makes up. It's just life.

As for Kephart's original question of when it matters when the lines between real life and fiction are blurred, I think that if a story is well-told and moving, then it really doesn't matter if the writer borrowed from their experience.