It's no secret that writers of fiction normally make up only most of their stuff, not all of it. They might picture a remembered location, person or event, but then unfold a completely invented scenario. Any snippets of fact will be distorted, exaggerated or overplayed - if only because reality usually needs sprucing-up to make a gripping story.
Equally, non-fiction often contains snippets of fabrication. Even (auto)biography can be embroidered with minor untruths. To elaborate or smooth-over certain details is part of a writer's technique, because who doesn't want to present themselves (or someone else) in the most interesting possible light?
Writers know this. They do it all the time. And even if they don't, they realise most other writers do. It's part of the process of good creative writing.
On the other hand, people who are not writers often believe fiction is reality disguised. They are inclined to think that when someone writes a first person story where the protagonist commits murder, say, then there's a chance the author has sinister motives and may even have actually murdered someone - or at least planned to.... or robbed a bank.... whatever it happens to be. They say: "I wonder if they really did kill their wife/husband?" or "Did they actually carry out that crime?"
As for me, anyone reading my autobiographical sketches can rely on them being more-or-less true - at least in essence. I might have re-ordered events, tarted-up a situation or invented a few minor details to enhance the flavour and add interest - because to relate a situation as it happened often turns out dull and plain - but the underlying story will be true to life.
As for the fiction, as I say, the opposite is the case. My stories, at core, are almost entirely invented, though perhaps containing elements of real events, people or locations as mechanisms to launch/nudge/support imagination, or create authenticity.
Here, in a short 2004 essay 'On Writing' where he demolishes three solid traditional rules, is what John Rechy says about imagination in story-writing:
Rule2: Write about What You Know. The moody spinster who left the English moors to travel to London only once in her lifetime fled back to her seclusion to write one of the most passionate love stories of all time. Emily Bronte's Wuthenng Heights illuminates a love so spectacular that it finds its only safe place within hell, not possible to be contained in a bland heaven.
Many great works of art would be canceled if the author had restricted himself to what he "knows." Think about crime novels—Raymond Chandler, James Cain, Dashiel Hanmett. What about Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment? Stephen Crane never saw war, but he wrote The Red Badge of Courage. Purportedly, Vladimir Nabokov was outraged when little girls started popping up at his door one Halloween, inferring that he wrote in Lolita about what he knew. Flaubert, asked how he came to understand Emma so well, answered, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." The good fiction writer relies primarily on imagination, not information, not investigation. Certainly intimate knowledge—plus imagination—have produced many works of grand literature.
The writer doesn't deal with “reality.” He deals with verisimilitude. He conjures his own "reality." We would be just as jarred if, along the weary way to California, Ma and Tom Joad encountered crazy old Dorothy skipping along the water-starved earth of Oklahoma as we would be if crazy old Dorothy encountered Ma and Tom Joad trudging along her yellow brick road, in both instances—Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Frank L Baum's The Wonderful World of Oz—it is not, respectively, reality, nor fantasy, but verisimilitude that would be jarred.
A better admonition might be: Write about what you feel. Too lofty. Write about what you feel you know. Too elevated. This is it: Write about whatever the hell you want to write about.
From 'Beneath the Skin - the collected essays of John Rechy' pp282 - 285 (2004).
Someone said after reading one of my more outrageous stories: "Blimey, did that actually happen?" And I replied: "There was a room like that, and there was this building in San Francisco, and this person... but they were in London... so: no, none of it really happened. I just imagined it as something that could happen, so let it develop into a story... and it worked (which it doesn't always)." If a story works a bit then being an idler I might not bother to polish it, resulting in an inferior product. It's this little issue of care and attention to detail, as much as anything, that distinguishes the professional from the amateur.
So although most of my stories lack, as well as much else, that crucial professional touch, I still think some of them are at least passable for entertainment value. And if my first-person characters have done anything heinous, it's from imagination and a distorted version of what I've heard of or read about (and maybe consciously forgotten), and probably not to do with me in my real life.
Outside this site there will be exceptions: occasionally a murderer writes of their deeds as if it's fiction. But I think such instances are rare.
My only regret is that I never had the skill, insight, diligence or passion, whatever it is, to create GREAT stories like those I cite here>> for example. No-one will recognise that better than me. But at least I gave it a go.
Regarding his dad's continual failure to get published, Hanif Kureishi writes:
"I was adept and successful a couple of years after I left university. I could do it; I just could. Whether it was a knack or trick or talent, I didn't know. It puzzled both of us. Art is easy for those who can do it, and impossible for those who can't."
From 'Intimacy' p 35, (2001)
And since, after 10 or 15-years or so, I've failed to achieve anything significant in this weird boundless arena of story-writing, there seems little point in continuing (though I still might?), especially as I'm now beginning to lose interest and no longer find as much pleasure in the process. Although the results from my little excursion remain, for what it's worth, on this site (and nowhere else: neither printed nor otherwise saved), I conclude that it's about time to accept defeat and call it a day...
Hence:
The END
& maybe try the memoir >>
