The Truth Behind Fiction

Fiction is a lie that tells truth – I’ve seen versions of that insight attributed to authors from Albert Camus to Stephen King. What I’d like to emphasize here is that the truth they’re talking about is yours. Your own truth underlies your writing even if you don’t always realize it. The urge to write fiction represents a kind of sounding – you’re drawn to a particular character or sequence of events because they resonate with you. They connect with something deep inside you that yearns to get expressed, something about life that you believe to be important and true. Something that matters intensely to you.

I’m not talking about truisms. In The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, the truth I sense isn’t simply that war is bad or that people can be evil or that Afghanistan is a scary place. If you think specifically of Amir, the protagonist, and his journey, you can feel it pushing at him throughout the story: the evil of others doesn’t acquit you – responsibility is part of love. In Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, in which Calliope, a hermaphrodite, is raised as a girl but emerges from puberty as a man, the truth has more teeth than mere acceptance of self. It’s about accepting what you feel to real and true, however bizarre it may seem. In contrast, consider Life of Pi by Yann Mantel, the story of young Piscine Molitor Patel and his survival on a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger, when another layer gets added that makes it seem as if the whole thing was a lie hiding a more desperate reality. But readers know which they feel called to believe. This book makes the case that stories may hold more truth than mere facts.

I don’t know why these truths matter to these authors, but I can tell that they do. These books reverberate with the power and authority of personal truth.

Writers don’t have to be able to articulate this at the outset. What you believe as expressed through your words can be something you discover through your writing. Our most startling insights often happen that way. But at some point, one way or the other, you want to go looking for the deepest connection between yourself, your characters, and your story. Ask yourself, what is it about this that matters so much to me? What is it that I most want these characters, and my readers, to hear?

Dara Marks discusses this in her excellent work on screenwriting, Inside Story – The Power of the Transformational Arc, and her advice applies to writing books for adults and children as well. You want your protagonist to have traits in resistance to your central truth – to need the journey to get there. You want your plot to include circumstances that challenge that resistance until it breaks. She cites John Keats: “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make a soul?”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise, says this in a somewhat daunting letter to a young would-be writer:

I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reaction, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. . . . This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories In Our Time went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In This Side of Paradise I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

You don’t need to share your characters’ same experiences for them to tell a truth that your own life has taught you. But if you aren’t in there somewhere, then you haven’t gone deep enough. Yet.

Photo courtesy of Todd Arkebauer.



Writing as a Full Body Experience

Photo courtesy of Luc Viatour / www.Lucnix.be
Photo courtesy of Luc Viatour / www.Lucnix.be

Writers have to learn to work on more than one level. At the same time we’re writing, we’re also reading – we’re both creating and reacting. While my mind keeps track of the story and the character’s progress through a scene, my heart is connected to her mood and my gut is registering tension. All my senses are alert to what her senses would be. (I could add that my hands are typing, but you get the idea.) If I have a character say something that doesn’t suit her state of mind, I get a sense of disconnection which tells me that I have to go back. If the tension flatlines, the first clue is that my stomach has unclenched. To some, this full body approach to writing comes naturally, but it can be an acquired skill. Often I go over a scene numerous times, focusing on three levels in particular.

First, the heart check: is the character carrying forward her emotional experience up to this point? If something angered her in the last chapter, that should still be throwing off some heat. If she’s anxious, that should color what she says. If the story is in first person or close third, then everything in the scene should be filtered through her state of mind, even the description of objects. The most effective and authentic way to accomplish this is to carry that state of mind inside yourself. This will allow you to go beyond the analytic (she should) and experience the filtering directly in an act of sympathetic imagination (she would). I assign this to my heart simply as a way of ordering the experience. What I’m talking about here is deep identification with our characters.

Next, the gut check: is there tension? Would a reader need to read on? Is there a mystery, a worry, an unfulfilled desire, a conflict, or even just a disquieting imbalance, something that a reader would want to see through? As writers, we must try to anticipate the sensation of reading our work as honestly as we can. To captivate others, we have to captivate ourselves. As you write, is your stomach so tense that the world outside falls away? Or do you find yourself starting to skim? The feedback of your body doesn’t lie. I assign this one to my gut, which is where I actually experience this kind of independent processing. What I’m talking about here, of course, is our identification with our readers.

Last, I return to the mind, which is also where I start. The mind has the biggest job. Character development, dialogue, plot, setting, language, metaphor, the list goes on and on…. Writing is submersive. You have to bring all your talents and faculties to bear. But that is how we can spend so many hours by ourselves at the computer, or with nothing but pen and paper. We carry inside us more than one experience, more than one person. We create a world outside ourselves by expanding the one inside.



The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Mitchell, David. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. Random House (New York: 2010).

The Thousand Autums of Jacob De ZoetA dense, rich novel of love not meant to be. Jacob, a young clerk with the Dutch East Indies Company in late 18th century Japan, becomes fascinated with the intelligent Miss Aibagawa, a local midwife whose facial scar has made her an outsider. Interestingly, Jacob isn’t her primary concern. Her point of view takes over when she’s exiled to a prison-like nunnery, from which Jacob would like to save her, but she looks to save herself. These characters stay with you, the prose is gorgeous, and the historical context is immersive and well-researched. We’re left with a resonant sense of the mark which a vivid experience can leave on a life.

For writers: In addition to the strengths already mentioned, writers should pay careful attention to the elasticity in the points of view here. Not only do they shift from one character to another – mostly in third person, sometimes in first – but even within a given point of view, there are shifts in closeness and tone. The central character of Jacob is rendered in third person, but the pov moves fluidly from more distant, ironic narration to close, free indirect style. For example, on the last page before Part Two, we are heartbreakingly close when Jacob realizes he loves Miss Aibagawa as he see her being taken away, and when he leaps the steps and opens his mouth to call out her name, but the last wry words belong to the narrator: “The well-oiled bolt slides home.”