Where does fact meet fiction? (1 of 3)

The idea for this post arose from a brief discussion on my Amazon Author page in which a gentleman who read an excerpt of STILTSVILLE in One Story magazine left a comment noting that although he liked the excerpt, he thought a detail about the hurricane described might be inaccurate. Another reader brought some more info to the table, and then I chimed in with my own mea culpa. I really appreciate these readers who cared enough to post messages, and they touch on a larger discussion about factual accuracy in fiction writing, and where writers draw the line.

A lot of historical events happened in the three decades covered in STILTSVILLE, all of which anyone living in Florida during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s will remember, and many of which are at least mentioned (if not described in detail) in the book. Did I get every detail right? Definitely not. Did I prioritize my fictional world over the real one? I don’t believe so, and I hope not. But it’s not as simple as it seems at first glance.

More on this later. The discussion thread got me thinking about how writers weave fact and fiction, which got me thinking about myths about writers and writing. This whole line of thought snowballed, and has resulted in a post that I’ve chopped into three sections:

1. The Mad Alcoholic Writer myth and the Thinly Veiled Autobiography myth

2. Using true-life settings in made-up books. With examples and a quiz!

3. How close to place and period detail should a writer stick?

Although most writers live domestic (read: not terribly interesting) daily lives and keep regular schedules and drink in moderation and exercise regularly and so on, there is still an ideation out there, in the American mythos, that writers are typing madly into the wee hours with a tumbler of single malt Scotch beside their keyboards. This archteypal writer is great at parties, tells stories about his benders in which celebrities and circus animals play starring roles, crashes on your couch with his shoes on, cheats on his wife and in poker. He is critically revered and is considered one of the great minds of his generation.

This is all OK with me. That mad alcoholic writer is far more interesting than I am, and he definitely exists (just not as commonly as we all might want to believe). Whether many writers have a dark little room inside their hearts where their inner, tamed, mad alcoholic lives is a subject for another post.

I loved this Paper Cuts interview with Lauren Groff, in which she describes a typical writing day, which includes “waking up to a screaming toddler,” then going out to her “wee little space that my husband carved out of the back of our garage. We call it a studio, but that’s being kind.” Now, that’s a writing day I recognize!

Another literary myth is that novelists are writing, at the character and plot level, about themselves. Of course, I understand the misapprehension. I mean, I tell people I’m writing about a family living in South Florida in the 1980s and 90s — what are they supposed to think?

Writers are often gently accused of creating characters who are thinly veiled versions of themselves, and plots that are thinly veiled personal experiences. Sometimes writers claim it, proudly — after all, what’s so wrong about that? — and sometimes they break down what’s true and what isn’t in their novels, and sometimes they just say that the novel is fiction, and that’s all there is to it. Sometimes they are taken at their word; more often, they are not.

I have a friend who wrote a scene in which her teenaged main character gets into a shouting match with her much-older sister — and the author’s own sister called her after the book came out, asking “Did I really say those terrible things to you?”

By this time, my friend had a little practice answering this kind of question. “No,” she said. “It’s fiction. I made it up. But I’m glad you thought the scene seemed true to life.” And she was being truthful — the scene was fiction, wholly and completely, and so were the characters. But she was glad her sister was so absorbed by the writing as to believe it might have actually happened in real life. She said she didn’t think her sister believed her.

The thing is, I don’t write about my family. I don’t know how. If I were to try to write a novel about my father and my mother and their complicated relationship to each other and my complicated relationship to them — I would fail. Horrifically. (I might fail in writing fiction, too, but not quite as blindingly.) I would feel disloyal, inhibited, whiny, and probably even dishonest. I love my characters, but they aren’t me/my mother/my father/my husband/my in-laws/my friends.

This isn’t to say I wouldn’t toss in a detail or two from my own experience (my family really did jump off the stilt house porch, for example, and throw water balloons at sailboats), but in the context of different characters, the original implications and meaning of the detail are lost. Rather, the detail absorbs the implications of its new context, and takes on a different meaning altogether.

TOMORROW: Using true-life settings in made-up books. With examples and a quiz!