Truth and Fiction
Recently, I led a one-night course on crafting fiction based on actual events. While I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, my research for A Letter in the Wall spanned several decades and was made up of bits and pieces of truth mixed in with a ton of speculation. It required me to continually decide how much I wanted to include what I knew about the individual whose letter inspired my story. The longer I worked on the manuscript, the less wedded I felt to the scant factoids I collected during my research. I became more concerned about staying true to historical, cultural and geographic facts, and, more importantly, to the premise of my book and psychological profile of my protagonist. Mirroring every detail I’d learned about the real Joan became less relevant.
During the discussion which followed my recent presentation, I was asked about the line between biography and fiction, and how I define what makes a story biographical. I had to think about this. My book can’t be considered a biography, I said, because the majority of the story was completely fabricated. Sure, I followed the timeline of an actual person’s life – her birth, marriages, children, death – and kept the family structure of her childhood intact (e.g., her mother’s death; the fact that she and her father resided with her aunt, uncle, and cousins; her education; etc.). My protagonist attends the same schools as the real Joan, moves to some of the same places the real Joan lived, and has some of the same experiences as the real Joan.
But, since I didn’t know the real Joan, nor anyone related to or involved with her, I could not possibly write a biography because it would be based on conjecture. In my book, the gaps in what I learned about her life were filled in with products of my own imagination and based on who I wanted my protagonist to be. Most, if not all, biographies include input from either people familiar with the subject of the story, personal journals, or interviews and other publicly-shared resources.
And, yet, the book does include some major elements of the real Joan’s life. At a recent visit to a book group that had just finished reading A Letter in the Wall, I was asked if any of Joan’s family might recognize themselves or Joan in my story. I changed all last names and most first names as well, but it’s entirely possible that her surviving adult children (there are one or two, I believe) would identify the story as an embellished and fictional version of their mother’s life. If I had claimed this to be a biography, Joan’s family would, most certainly, take issue with everything I fabricated. Biographies must stick to facts, and if they contain some speculation, that needs to be made clear. But, obviously, they cannot be filled with made-up events and people.
I think the more relevant and (if I’m being immodest) interesting takeaway from the genesis of my book is that I created a fully-formed character, with an entire life story, from an old letter and scant facts I learned about a real person. Though my protagonist can be difficult, confounding and unlikeable at times, the real Joan may have been much worse. My protagonist’s adult children have a reasonable amount of concern for their mother, yet they also struggle with how to tolerate her mood swings and unpredictable actions; the real Joan’s children may have had dysfunctional relationships with their mother and each other.
Two more significant fabricated elements of my story, however, are the nature of the relationships between Joan and her business partner, and Joan and the boy to whom she wrote that letter in the wall. How they meet and interact, and the trajectories of the relationships, are solely products of my imagination. I also incorporated several fictional characters to move the plotline along and serve the premise of the book.
I am a fan of Marie Benedict’s books. She weaves stories around real people, some of whom are the main characters and others who are more secondary, and imagines motivations, conflicts, conversations, and sub-plots to create a “story-behind-the-story” of a famous character. In The Only Woman in the Room, we get inside the mind of Hedy Lamar to understand how her life progressed as it did. In Carnegie’s Maid, Andrew Carnegie is not the central character but, rather, a means to enter the mind and world of the fictional protagonist and suppose how she may have affected some of Carnegie’s decisions. Benedict’s proficiency in teetering just on the edge of nonfiction into an imaginary world makes her a very popular author.
The person on whom my protagonist is based was neither famous nor remarkable in my assessment. It is the backstory of my inspiration for the book which, I think, makes what I’ve written just a bit more compelling to a reader.
