Happy Thursday, everybody!
Okay, today's post has been brewing for a while.
Where does life become fiction, and fiction become life?
I've been asked more times than I can count if I base some of my fiction on my own life. The answer is, 'yes, of course.' Do I draw from real experiences and put them in stories? Again, a resounding 'YES.'
But find me a single writer who doesn't.
I am not suggesting for a moment that any of my novels or stories are my own life-story. If they were, they'd be categorised as autobiography and not fiction. I am not a carbon copy of any character I've ever created, and yet there are elements of me in most if not all of them. How could there not be? They are my creations, products of my own mind and imagination.
But I do take inspiration from things I've experienced. So then, if something actually happened and it ends up in a story, is it still fiction? If I twist a few things and change a few things, does that mean it crosses the line between reality and fiction? What about if I take something real, or an element of something real, and then take it to an extremes and make that into a story?
Is it still fiction if it happened, but not exactly in the way I tell it? Or if I remove myself and put a character in my place and swap around a few details? And is it still real life if I'm rewriting the ending?
Where is the line - if there even is one?
Isn't the point of good fiction the absolute belief that it COULD happen? Even in a completely fantastical story, it should be convincing enough, real enough, for a reader to suspend their disbelief and feel that what they are reading could actually happen. So is it possible to write really good fiction without drawing, however loosely, on some elements of one's own life and experience?
So maybe the line is there. Maybe it's just more blurred than it seems.
