Anyone who hangs out with professional writers for very long will eventually hear one of them say “I couldn’t get away with that in a novel” or “If I put that in a story, nobody would believe it,” and they’ll probably hear it sooner rather than later. It’s the bane of fiction writers everywhere. Years ago, I ran across a related anecdote that went something like this:
A professor of creative writing was giving a student comments – mostly negative – on the story he had just submitted. In particular, the professor had a number of things to say about the implausibility of the plot, the lack of apparent motivation for the character’s actions, and the unrealistic nature of specific events. The student got twitchier and twitchier, and finally burst out, “But that’s what really happened! It was just like that!”
The instructor looked at the student for a minute, and then said, “I believe you. But you still have to make me believe your story.”
Many writers use incidents from real life in their writing. “It really happened” is, however, a terrible justification for doing anything in a novel…if it’s the only justification for doing it. There are a number of reasons for this, first and foremost the fact that real life doesn’t have to have a coherent plot (or make any sense at all, actually).
A lot of beginning writers find this more than a little confusing. They have been told repeatedly that real life is material; if it’s material, then surely it should go into their stories! What they don’t realize is that real life is raw material. If you want to build a car, you don’t slap a bunch of iron ore, some sand, a rubber tree, and a couple of cows together and call it good; you have to take the raw materials and turn them into steel and glass and rubber and leather, and then into car parts and windshields and tires and seats, and then you have to put all those pieces together in the right places. Then you finally have a car.
Novels are a model of reality, not a transcription of it. Authors take the raw material of real life events and give it explanations and motivations and consequences, then turn it into characters and plot and put them together into a coherent story. Even the most realistic fiction doesn’t resemble real life anything like as closely as we pretend it does.
This is most obvious in dialog, where a word-for-word transcription of an actual conversation on a bus or at a restaurant will instantly demonstrate how different dialog is from the way most people actually talk, but it is just as true for every other aspect of a novel, from character complexity and motivation to plot twists.
For instance, take forgetting things. In real life, people forget important stuff all the time, from their car keys to their anniversary date. In fiction, one has less leeway, especially if the consequences of forgetting something are potentially fatal. “Ooops, I left my sword in my other scabbard” just doesn’t work in anything other than a really broad parody.
Real life doesn’t have to be convincing. It is just there, happening that way, whether we like it or not. Novels, on the other hand, are deliberately constructed. Every action, incident, character, and place in a novel is there because the author put it in, and on some level readers know it. It’s artificial, and that means the novel-writer has to do a bit more work to convince the reader that the story is “real,” compared to the journalist who can simply report a wildly unlikely event.
If something happens in a novel, we expect there to be an explanation, a reason, and a payoff, or why would the author bother to put it in? That’s why I started off saying that “it really happened” can’t be the only justification for putting something in a novel. There has to be a reason internal to the novel for that incident or description or whatever to be there; it has to have a payoff within the story. “Payoff” can mean that the incident starts or ends a chain of plot events, or that it results in a new discovery or a revelation of a character’s backstory, or even that it displays something new about the nature of the world the characters are living in, but whatever it is, it has to make sense in the context of the story.
“Making sense” is a matter of motivation and foreshadowing, setup and consequences – all the things that you may never know when it comes to a real-life incident. You may never know why a stranger came up to you in the hotel lobby and said “Will you hold my duck for ten minutes?” and handed you a duck, then disappeared for a while before coming back, thanking you, and giving you a ten-dollar bill, but if you put that in a book, you not only had better know who the stranger is and why he need somebody to take his duck for ten minutes, but you had better also make sure the reader finds out at some point what all that was about and why it was relevant to the main story you’re telling. Unless, of course, you are writing the sort of surreal novel in which that kind of thing is routine, but in that case the incident does “make sense” in the surreal world of your story, and may even have something to do with the three angels who are trying to catch a cab just outside the hotel.
A lot depends on where you put it. A mad coincidence works well as a starting point — I once read a writer who said you can’t have the wizard throw fire at the hero and watch it bounce off unless you show the hero walking through the bonfire and explaining it’s a family trait. To which my instant thought was that would be a wonderful starting point. The hero has just learned he’s fireproof, the wizard is annoyed that his spell didn’t work (more than when he just cast it), and the story is off and rolling.
Or the time someone posted online about the murder case where they looked like they would get off scot-free — the wife of one murderer insisted that he was home at Xpm because Bonzana came on just then — but then the prosecution produced the station manager who testified that Bonzana had been pre-empted that night and hadn’t run at all. She said you could never put it in a story. I said, wrong POV is the only problem. Though I wouldn’t use it as a climax. It could be a subplot where a young prosecutor learns to check every detail, which will be important for the climax — or annoys his superiors by winning the case they had assigned to humble him. Or it could be a revenge plot where one crook (since it does not need to be murder) goes after the others for bungling it — either from the pursuer’s or the pursued’s POV.
A similar – if a bit simpler – problem is putting into a story something you wished HAD happened.
But in that case, if it didn’t happen in real life, you spend a lot of time making SURE it can happen in the world of the novel.
Some things can end up seeming so real they must have happened – but that doesn’t excuse the writer from doing the work of making it not only plausible, but inevitable.
It is fun to put bits of real life into your writing – and sometimes there are one or two people who know exactly what you’ve done – and then motivate it completely differently.
Writing is such power.
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
—Tom Clancy
“Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”
—Mark Twain
“We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of life. Narrative is reassuring. There are days when life is so absurd, it’s crippling–nothing makes sense, but stories bring order to the absurdity.”
—Norman Mailer
On the other hand:
“Sometimes the last thing in the world you need is sense. Work a thing through until it makes sense, and you lose all the possibilities.”
—Charles de Lint
I totally agree. Every scene in a novel needs to make sense for that world, and it also needs to have a purpose. I hate it when books meander so much that I want to cut out half the writing.
This!
Although I also agree with:
😀
The phrase I like to use is, “Reality is self-proving.”
And I’m now picturing a very annoyed cow perched in the branches of a rubber tree.
Putting one’s wishes in the story is very dangerous. There are, after all, stories that are dubbed wish-fulfillment just because the average reader can see the thumb on the scale.
But that’s exactly where the skill comes in: in making it impossible for the the average reader to ‘see the thumb on the scale.’
We HAVE to take from real life – what else do we have? – but we also have to transform it in the interest of THIS story, THIS character.
Otherwise, call it memoir or autobiography – and write to a different standard of ‘truth.’
Fiction is a patchwork of lies.
J.M. – my daughter sometimes catches these. And if it’s going to be obvious, I’ll ask the person involved if it’s okay to steal it. I haven’t been refused yet – I will have to start keeping track if I get demurrals.
I teach a writing class to 3rd and 4th graders. We are currently discussing outlines versus brainstorming and how to narrow the focus into something you can actually write about in a few paragraphs. Your analogy of the car versus real life (and the transcription of the bus conversation and the forgetting things bit) all fit perfectly into this discussion! I’ve already passed on a recommendation of your books, time to pass on your writing experience and wisdom as well!