"There are moments in life where you feel everything slow down around you; where you feel your world shift beneath you, and you suddenly know that from then on, nothing will ever be quite the same..."
Trust Me, (C) Jess Dixon, 2010

Thursday, 3 February 2011

Life and Fiction

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.
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4 comments:

  1. Anonymous5 February 2011 at 10:22

    Yes, but real life is very badly plotted: much of it is dull; some of it, nobody would want to read about it; all the really interesting stuff would be met with baffled incredulity by editors, publishers and readers; and the endings always seem unsatisfactory.

    Which is to say: writing about your life requires the talents of a ruthless editor and quite a bit of authors' license.

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  2. Anonymous5 February 2011 at 10:25

    Also... OMG The sex scenes of a 'real life'. Seriously. Embarrassing.

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  3. Jess5 February 2011 at 10:57

    Ahaha, oh so true... *grin.*

    Also, I know what you mean about real-life being badly plotted. Take an experience I recently used to inspire the story. The real-life ending would have sucked in a story. Unsatisfactory and annoying to say the least. But on taking things to an extreme and then rewriting the ending.... suddenly I have a story that seems to be being enjoyed by readers so far.

    Thanks for reading my page! :)

    Jess

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  4. Anonymous6 February 2011 at 16:56

    I think that in order to do anything creative one must give of oneself, so I suppose it's inevitable that some of oneself will end up in what one creates. One cannot write about something one has not experienced, after all.

    I think the difference between real life and fiction is not so much about whether it actually happened or not, but rather what hairyears has already touched upon: the process of writing turns real life, which is big and ragged and kind of messy, into fiction, which is tidy and has narrative. This connects to all sorts of disgustingly postmodern literary theory, which I think is awesome, but YMMV.

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