How Do You Adapt Real Life Into Fiction?
By Guest | May 20, 2022 |
Please welcome author-in-progress Kristina Stevens to Writer Unboxed today! We were approached by WU contributor Jim Dempsey about Kristina’s journey, which has involved writing a novel that began as a memoir. How did she decide on that change? What did that change entail? And would we be interested in sharing the journey (yes!).
More about Kristina from her bio:
Kristina lives in Glasgow, Scotland where she works in education. Kristina has an MA in English Literature and has recently completed a six month mentorship programme for under represented writers with Arkbound Foundation. Kristina is interested in outsiders and modern interpretations of gothic themes in fiction. She is currently working on her first novel ‘Outsider Complex’. Kristina is also a carer.
You can learn more about Kristina by following her on Twitter @kriss_outsider.
How Do You Adapt Real Life Into Fiction?
“All this happened, more or less.”
This is the opening line to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The novel is a semi-autobiographical account of the bombing of Dresden by the Allied Forces in 1945. Anyone familiar with Slaughterhouse-Five, however, would struggle to define it as realistic or true to life. The novel contains time travel and alien abduction, not things that you would believe “happened, more or less.”
So although we can safely say that Slaughterhouse-Five is not a factual account of the author’s experience of war, it does contain truth, or rather Truth. Slaughterhouse-Five disrupts the traditional structure of the novel, and the often chaotic form of the chapters reflects Billy Pilgrim’s frame of mind, his trauma resulting from the Dresden air raids. The narrative is non-linear and scenes describing the bombing can present as incoherent. This confusion and futility is the ultimate metaphor of war and its horror.
Memoir or Fiction?
When I started writing, I wasn’t sure if I should write in the form of memoir or fiction, but I settled on memoir. I believed memoir would have the most impact as there nothing more powerful than literal truth. In this world of “fake news” and spin, I felt that to tell my story I had to be painfully honest and adhere doggedly to fact. However, through the process of writing, I have learned that honesty and truth can be conveyed sometimes more effectively and potently through storytelling and metaphor.
You might have noticed that I called my writing ‘my story’, but that changed as the story itself became more important than my place or ego within that. Memoir is by its nature an account of an experience or experiences as interpreted by the author. However, the more I wrote, the more I felt myself being pushed out the story. I wasn’t at the centre of it, rather it was developing its own volition. I thought I was writing about specific themes and ideas, but I began to see that the story was asking its own question: Where do I belong?
I realised that question was central to everything and had to be explored; it was the essence of what I was trying to say. The day-to-day factually correct record of events and conversations became unimportant, even irrelevant. As I started to write, this concept of ‘Where do I belong’ began to grow more powerful, and I knew that in order to fully explore the story and the question it wanted to ask, the story had to be fiction and not memoir. This change freed the work from the constraints of memory and allowed it to grow and become its true self. By being less literal and chained to documentary detail, I was able to deploy metaphor and symbolism more effectively. By employing more ‘poetic licence,’ I was able to tell the story as it should be told.
When Facts Cause Clutter
As readers, we approach memoir and fiction differently, and our expectations differ. We see this when we discover that a supposed memoir turns out to be fabricated; we feel duped and cheated. However, we don’t feel the same anger if we discover a novel is based on true events. We might pick up a memoir, for instance, because we believe the author’s life mimics our own in some way, or perhaps we admire them for a certain achievement. It is the real-life lessons we are looking for, and so any details that add to its authenticity are to be valued. We approach reading fiction more like reading a treasure map: Every sentence is a clue or holds potential symbolic significance, and anything that distracts us from following the path to the treasure is a waste of precious time.
Likewise, when writing a memoir, providing historical facts can give the writing an air of authenticity, and this level of detail can make the story richer. In fiction, however, these details can act as red herrings or simply clutter. An example of how I had to adapt this in my own writing is when I described my biological father as having brown eyes and myself and two siblings as having blue eyes. In memoir, this is an interesting and unusual fact, and lends a degree of uniqueness to the family, makes them more human in their quirkiness. In fiction, however, we naturally ask: Why is the writer drawing attention to this point above all others? It must be for a reason as yet unknown. And this creates an expectation in the reader. So, in fiction, if I were to mention my father had brown eyes whilst his offspring had blue, the reader might respond by assuming that detail is significant. Perhaps they aren’t his kids after all? Is this the twist, the biological father isn’t actually the biological father? Did the mother have an affair or use a sperm donor? Does the father know this? Is it still a secret? Is there going to be a showdown later on in the story? And so on. If this is then not developed or mentioned again the reader can feel one of two things: They can feel cheated that they were set up for intrigue that didn’t materialize or annoyed over the extraneous and distracting information, i.e clutter. So when adapting my book from memoir to fiction, mention of my father’s brown eyes had to go; they had nothing to do with the story.
When the truth actually detracts from the story
Sticking religiously to a complete history of documented truths can be detrimental to your story whether you’re writing historical fiction or a memoir. Real life is made up of millions of interlinking stories, but taken out of context and thrust into the vacuum of a single work, even facts can come across as trite, contrived, or extraneous. The trick is to know what threads to cauterize and where to do the cauterizing.
An example: When my writing was still memoir, I adhered to the absolute truth and described my family life. We had a relative living with us during the time I wrote about who was mixed race and used a wheelchair. This was a big part of my life at the time, and more so as his frustrations and struggles impacted all of us. But to include issues such as race and disability in a story with no significance to the story being told could be interpreted as tokenistic. My story isn’t about race or disability and so it felt uncomfortable to have these issues introduced but not develop any significance, and so the relative had to be written out of my memoir.
In adapting memoir to fiction, and to properly explore the life of one protagonist, others were also written out the story. For example, a female referenced in my memoir had a series of boyfriends, the last of them a drug user. Because of his criminal record, this woman had to be strip-searched at the airport when coming back from India. Despite this, when he left her for another, she was distraught. When I changed my writing to fiction, I realized that the succession of boyfriends and the drugs were irrelevant to the story’s central question, ‘Where do I belong?’ What was important—and what did intersect with my story question—was this woman’s reaction to the break-up. One composite boyfriend character was all that I needed. This then allowed for that relationship to be explored in more depth, revealing more about why the relationship broke down, and leading to insights about its impact on the protagonist and her erroneous beliefs.
Returning to Slaughterhouse-Five, if Vonnegut had written a traditional novel with a beginning, a middle and an end that gave an articulate but conventional account of war, would it have had the same impact? Would it have held our attention quite so much or made us question what is actually going on? I don’t think it would. Slaughterhouse-Five is so powerful because it makes us look at Truth from a different perspective. It challenges our preconceptions and beliefs about how we convey emotions and meaning and interpretation. It uses subversion and metaphor and surrealism, but the truth at its heart remains untainted, in fact it shines brighter for it.
Does the line between reality and fiction smear in your own work? Whether the scope of this smear is via a character, a situation, in a short story or a work of novel-length fiction, we’d love to hear about it in comments. The floor is yours!
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
The journey of self-discovery has a simple plot, seeking the answer to a profound question: Where do I belong? Or alternately, who am I? Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do? Every person’s answer is different but every journey is the one that we all take. Wonderful post.
Thank you Donald. It has been an interesting journey watching all my expectations and pre-conceived ideas about writing fall steadily by the wayside! But in a good way :)
Hello Kristina. You develop the complexities that relate to fiction vs memoir very well. I especially like your distinguishing between truth and Truth. In either fiction or memoir, the aim–I hope–is to seek to write something that exposes what’s true. This is why I steer clear of writing about people close to me. I always feel a sense of moral responsibility to tell the truth relative to their factual history. I know many fiction writers have no such problem. They make use of friends and family without being hamstrung by such concerns, and this applies both to memoirists and fiction writers. I’m just not one of them.
Yes Barry it’s a difficult one. The more I write the less factual history becomes important as I learn how unreliable memory and interpretation of those memories are. I think, for me, what is important is the essence of what the person or situation represents. But of course it also depends on what genre etc you are writing in and how big a part realism plays in building that world :).
I relate to so much in this article. My debut novel, A Letter in the Wall (May 24, 2022, Spark Press), was inspired by an actual letter I found in the wall of my house. Initially, I wanted to write a biography of the enigmatic woman who grew up in my house and wrote, but never mailed, a cryptic letter. I researched her life and her family and, after learning she was murdered, I decided to write a fictionalized imagining of who she was. In my “Author’s Note” at the end of the book, I disclose that the story is based on an actual person. What happens after readers finish the book is that they want to know which parts are real and which were fabricated, and this, to me, is an irrelevant issue (albeit, one born out of curiosity and interest). I try to emphasize that, while I was inspired to write the story because of what happened to a real person, my work of fiction should not be construed as reflecting an actual person’s life. If the backstory weren’t so interesting, I might not have disclosed it at all.
That sounds so intetesting Eileen and very similar to a new project I want to research based on a photograph I found. Good luck with the book and I will be looking out for it.
I love this post,, Kristine. Such an insightful, thoughtful analysis of story versus truth (versus Truth), and determining what serves the story best. Thanks for sharing it.
Thank you so much Tiffany. Switching from memoir to (auto) fiction really highlighted to me the craft of fiction – to the reader we are absorbed in a complete world but in reality it is such a one dimensional representation of ‘reality’. There is so much cutting and stitching and re-arranging, but that is all invisible to good fiction.
I resonate totally with the previous comments, so I won’t repeat them but add this: After I published my first novel Queen of the Owls, I was often asked if the protagonist was “really me.” Although the specific events in the story were invented, at the deepest level—emotionally, the inner lived experience—indeed, she is very much “me.” But what is “me?” A certain part of me—brought to the surface, polished, enlarged, and “translated” into a fictional character. I couldn’t have written the novel if I hadn’t had specific experiences, inner and outer. But it is fiction, not memoir. At other times, just as you say, the process can take place in the opposite order and memoir must be given attributes of fiction in order to find its real power. What a wonderful subject to contemplate! Thank you for offering us such a rich way to ponder it together!
Thank you so much Barbara. Yes, you are so right that intentional or not we bring all our experiences and knowledge to our writing – and that is what makes each writer unique and the potential for creativity limitless. I started writing about myself and saw the character take on a life of her own to the point I no longer see it as my story but the character’s! It was also a strange to realise that factual truth sounded more made up than the fictitious version!
Lovely essay Kristina. I find it fascinating how stories take on a life of their own to reveal the greater truth.
I just had to look it up…brown eyes are dominant. Blue eyes are recessive. Both parents have to have blue eyes in order for you
to have blue eyes. Now what about green eyes? Fiction is wonderful, we can make stuff up or more research required. Thanks for your post.
“But to include issues such as race and disability in a story with no significance to the story being told could be interpreted as tokenistic.”
What is the opposite of tokenistic? To be written out of a story because you are disabled and not the right race.
Stopped me in my tracks, as a disabled and mobility-impaired writer who loved her Mexican grandfather as much as her Hungarian one. Similar in affect to disabled people rarely seeing disabled actors portraying the few disabled roles available on TV or in movies. Example: the son with CP in Breaking Bad was portrayed by a young actor who talks about having to learn to act as if he were impaired. So great to see a few actors with Down Syndrome getting good roles – because, of course, it is very hard to ‘portray’ DS.
I would, instead, have found a way to be inclusive of the person and the disability – because it is estimated that 20% of people have a disability.
“This was a big part of my life at the time, and more so as his frustrations and struggles impacted all of us.”
It is an interesting choice, made in this direction by many, if not most, writers. I wonder what would happen if you made it inclusive instead.
I remember feeling and going through the exact same situation when writing my novel, The Sleeping Serpent. By writing it in first person as a memoir I would have left out so many scenes and experiences of other characters. As memoir I also felt it would be MY story… and I really wanted this book to reach a lot of women who experienced similar relationship abuse, allowing them to see themselves in the novel. So, I’m glad you are writing what many call auto(biographical)fiction. I think a large majority of acclaimed authors such as Hemingway, Strout, and Lahiri to name only three I adore, have done the same
Hi Luna, thank you for your encouraging words. I think that memory is so pliant and easily distorted and misinterpreted that it would be impossible to present ‘factual truth’ anyway. I feel that it’s better to tell a story that has emotional truth and will resonate with people, which is what it sounds like you have done in your novel. Was it difficult or cathartic to explore such a challenging subject?
Thank you for this article! I first wrote a memoir but wasn’t happy with it, then went on to a fictionalized memoir, a novel, but after writing a few chapters and an outline I found I was still constrained by actual facts and felt so bogged down and uninspired as a result. I’m now writing short stories, many of them using metaphor, which I find a more powerful way to express a truth. It’s nice to know you’ve had that same experience! And I’m encouraged by you saying the story isn’t about you now, because I really felt so burdened by it being about me. I’m now writing short stories which gives me a lot of room to experiment. Thanks for giving me a new way to tell my story in novel form, without it having to be literally my story. Hugely helpful!
Hi Margaret, I’m so glad you got something from the article and hopefully you can now apply your short story techniques to your novel. Although I wrote in first person, I used another name and from there a new character completely separate from me began to evolve. The more I detached from the story, the more fictional it became. What I found really interesting was how unreliable memory can be and the blurred boundaries between fact and perception!