Using true-life settings in made-up books. With examples and a quiz!
(The post arose from a brief discussion on my Amazon Author page and started with an earlier post about the thinly veiled autobiography myth.)
In some novels, what comes from the author’s experience is not character or plot, but setting. This might seem obvious, but a lot of writers depend much more heavily on the places they’ve been than on replicating the circumstances of their lives. The schools and homes and roller skating rinks and ice cream parlors and boat marinas and city halls of their experiences are, often, the landmarks of their novels.
Which begs the question that I think confronts every writer at one point or another: How close to the facts should fiction stick?
I’m not talking about historical novels, which it goes without saying should be pretty darn close, or even re-imagined historical novels (I’m thinking of Ian McEwan’s excellent ATONEMENT, which is an imagined story deeply entwined with an historical event). I’m talking about novels that are not heavily reliant on historical events, but happen against a true-life backdrop.
I’m talking about being true to setting, which includes place and period.
Here’s an example. (This is not an example from my writing.)
Let’s say your novel is set in Florida City, Florida, in 1999. Your main characters, two brothers, live in a duplex on Thelma Terrace, and in their backyard is a hammock that swings between black walnut trees, and there’s an easement on the property that cuts through the backyard of a gas station that’s been closed for years, and at the far end of that lot there’s a creek where the characters sometimes wade on hot days. And let’s say they wade in this creek, together, on July 4th of that year.
Next, a quiz! There are no wrong answers.
Now let’s say you have a reader who lives in Florida City, and has lived there all her life. She knows Thelma Terrace. It’s a one-block residential street lined with banyans — but there are no duplexes on Thelma.
Is this changed detail a fact-and-fiction sin? Was it a mistake to include it?
Now, let’s back up. Let’s say there ARE duplexes on Thelma — the block is full of them, actually, but there are no black walnut trees there. In fact, there are no black walnut trees in Florida City. In fact, there are no black walnut trees in all of South Florida!
Is this detail a fact-and-fiction sin?
Now let’s say you’ve changed black walnut trees to mangrove trees, so you’re safe there. But let’s say there’s no gas station, open or closed, in the Thelma Terrace neighborhood, though there is a tackle shop. And there’s no creek — although there is one a few miles inland.
Do these inaccuracies rise to the level of writing sin?
Finally, let’s say that on July 4, 1999, there was a major event that affected pretty much everyone in Florida City — say, a storm during which several people were killed by fallen lines and the whole city lost power — only you didn’t include it in your novel at all, even though the novel covers that period, and Florida City is not very big.
Sin?
So let’s air our answers to the above hypotheticals. Is it a “writing sin” to put your characters in a duplex on a real-life street, if in real life there are no duplexes on that street?
No, I don’t think this rises to the level of sin. I think it’s a good idea to use a real street name if you’re writing about a real place, since presumably you’ve chosen to write about a real place for a reason. I think it’s a good idea to choose a street that suits your characters and their demographics. But sometimes real street names stink, or sometimes they’re perfectly named but in the wrong part of town. I don’t think you should move around real streets, geographically, in fiction, but I do think you can fudge a bit regarding what sits on that street. Maybe don’t put a shopping mall in the middle of an historic neighborhood, but otherwise I think it’s OK.
How about the black walnut tree?
Yes, this is a sin, in my opinion. The first example is a writer embellishing on reality, but staying basically true to the spirit of the real place. The second is just an easily avoided error. (As one might guess, there’s a lot of flora in STILTSVILLE, and I had readers with much greener thumbs than mine look for inaccuracies. But I wouldn’t bet my life that there are no flora-related mistakes in the novel. And those would be examples of errors, not license.)
Next example — I think it’s OK to add an invented gas station and a creek to Thelma Terrace, as long as they are, as I mentioned, true to the spirit of the location.
NOTE: I definitely know at least one writer who would disagree with me on this. She would say that if you’re going to use a real street, you shouldn’t futz with the buildings or anything else. Because — and I’ll elaborate on this in tomorrow’s post — it will interrupt the reading experience for anyone who knows the true-life neighborhood.
Now, we come to the exclusion of an important local event from the narrative — July 4, 1999, in the fictional world of this example, does not include a storm and fatalities from a downed power line and a blackout. (Why not? This seems like a great setting for fiction! But that’s beside the point.)
Let’s assume there’s some other reason organic to your novel that requires the plot to be set on July 4, 1999. So you can’t simply move the date of the story to another month or year. If this is true, then that means that your novel is tied to history, at least at some other point in its narrative. I don’t think you can reasonably ignore a big event that occurred at the same time. I think you can write through it, make it incidental instead of the focus, but I don’t think you can ignore it entirely.
More often, though, it’s not a matter of excluding events, but of including them. When I wrote the first draft of STILTSVILLE, I had an idea of which historical events I wanted to include — the Mariel boatlift, the Dadeland shootings, the McDuffie riots, Cristo’s Pink Islands, the Gainesville murders — but the novel covers three decades. I’m sure I didn’t mention everything that affected people’s lives during that period. Did I miss any really big event during that time period? I hope not, but at the same time, my focus was on the events that mattered most to my characters.
But I also had in mind the personal lives of my characters, which proceeded independently of certain historical events. Maybe if I were a more organized writer — I’ve heard some writers even use outlines! What a revelation! — I wouldn’t have had the problem of matching the characters’ lives to the history of the city. But I did have that problem, and I had to intentionally include some timeline inaccuracies as a result. I wrote an Author’s Note to try to explain these inaccuracies that I believed needed to stay in the story, in service of the whole. Fallen soldiers, as I think of them.
TOMORROW: What should a fiction writer sacrifice for factual accuracy?
