How do you take what you know, your real-life experience, and turn it into fiction? This is a question I have been wrestling with. When I wrote my story, “The Sweater,” for Sister Writes (the Sister Writes magazine), I struggled with telling the “truth” versus telling the “story.” One of the valuable lessons I’ve learned in the writing workshop is that it’s okay to change things even when writing about an event inspired by truth. Creative writing is just that – creative. Author Bret Anthony Johnston writes in his Atlantic Monthly article “Don’t Write What You Know”: “The goal isn’t to represent an experience, but instead to create a piece of art that is in itself an experience.” You are allowed to use your imagination.
That may seem self-explanatory but I realized that one of the reasons I write is to make sense of events in my life. I thought that understanding came from recounting literal truth. But I have discovered that I don’t want to just understand; I want to go further. I want my writing to help answer the question, “What don’t I know and what do I want to know?” Johnston goes on to talk about his early stories: “I was writing to explain, not to discover.” That makes sense; I have done that too. The problem is that explanation can quickly become a tedious exercise. And if you are not excited about what you are writing your readers won’t be excited either.
This doesn’t mean that your experiences aren’t valid or that your life isn’t exciting enough to write about. The captivating parts of any life are the emotional details. These details can provide the framework for a fictional story. Ann Patchett, in her collection of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, writes: “What exactly is a made-up story? In my books I make up the experiences and the characters, but the emotional life is real. It is my own.” Emotions are universal. No matter where you live, no matter your experience, you have felt love, loneliness, anger, fear. You can create a fictional world peopled with characters who feel the way you have felt.
Sometimes, your life experience can inform your writing in a more literal way. Stephen King in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft writes, “People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.” Dr. Vincent Lam, a Canadian physician, won the 2006 Giller Prize for his fictional collection of interconnected stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. One reviewer sagely said: “There is no information like insider information.” In interviews, Lam talks about the knowledge of doctors and hospitals that lives inside him and that provided the building blocks for his fiction. This left him free to focus on character and detail and story. Dr. Lam has also written non-fiction and he acknowledges the inherent differences for a writer: “Fiction is just this cloud one enters and can do anything. But that’s actually quite terrifying. It’s all the writer…”
Perhaps this explains my trepidation in tackling imaginary characters and settings. Fiction writing offers “limitless freedoms” as Patchett says, and so requires the courage to embrace that freedom. One of the stories I used to tell about myself was that I didn’t have the imagination to write fiction. I don’t think that anymore. I think we all have the imagination to craft stories. Once we realize that what we know is a good enough place to start then we can trust our creative self to imagine the rest. Author Lawrence Hill, when asked about “writing what you know,” said: “The imagination is the richest tool you will ever have as a novelist… To use your imagination is to use a gift of the gods.” I think he’s right. And when we unlock that “gift” within, we give ourselves the key to discovering what we don’t know. We have a chance to go beyond ourselves and to create art that illuminates. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: “From all things that you don’t know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive.”
Your task this week:
- Write a short scene featuring a character that is unlike you-different age, sex, or background.
Til next time, keep writing.