THE FACTS ABOUT FICTION

Some time ago, I was giving a masterclass at one of our universities. It was a class of post-graduate students in creative writing, and my broad topic was ‘the difference between writing fact, and writing fiction.’

The Joys of being a fiction writer. You’re free as a bird to write what you want…provided…..

The advice I gave was general, but when I was interacting with the group about plot development and characters, I could feel waves of antipathy coming from a 30-something year old man, who was shaking his head at many of the things I was saying. What to do? Ignore him, even though people surrounding him were obviously influenced by the negative tsunami spreading through the class? I couldn’t let him engulf the rest, and so no, I couldn’t ignore him. I had to confront the issue.

Everything had been going well in the masterclass, until I told the story of what happened to me when I was giving a speech to a London audience about I book I was on tour promoting, which had just been published by HarperCollins. Briefly, the book concerned the events in Russia and the Ukraine before the Second World War. Meyer Davidovich was one of the minor characters who worked for Kaganovich, the evil man who orchestrated the famine in the Ukraine which killed an estimated four million human beings. I’d found him in some research, and used him as a character, explaining his evil and murderous intent. I happened to mention him in my talk to a group of the elderly in London, when suddenly, in the audience, a woman in her 60’s shouted out: “That’s a lie! You’re wrong!”

Stalin and his Politburo grew fat while four million Ukrainian men women and children starved to death in 1932

There was an immediate hush which came over the London lecture hall, and I was in the headlights of every person there. My response was courteous and gentle. I said, “Forgive me, Madam, I really don’t like to contradict you, but I’ve researched him thoroughly, and ….”

“I don’t care about research,” she said. “You’re wrong. For ten years my grandmother was that man’s mistress in order to survive the famine, and he didn’t do the things you said.”

Of course, everybody burst out laughing, but none more than me. It was a wonderful moment in bursting the bubble of authorial hubris.

I then went on to tell my masterclass that while it’s important to be accurate, historians and journalists have to be servants of the truth; novelists have to be storytellers.

And it was that with which the man in my masterclass profoundly disagreed. So I asked him why he was so opposed to the things which I’d told him about writing fiction. He said that although we novelists are storytellers, our stories have to be painstakingly accurate when we’re writing about real life people or events. Especially when these events can be checked against chronicled evidence. He spoke about truth in fiction, and fiction in truth.

Novelists make up stuff, but be careful when it can easily be checked in a reference library

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He made an interesting point. Half the students disagreed and the others agreed with him. I allowed the exchange of views to continue for some time, and then he turned the discussion on me. “You obviously disagree, and think that a novelist can make up everything in his book, just because he’s writing fiction.”

Instead of telling you how I dealt with it, allow me to tell you another quick story…..a highly intelligent academic friend decided to write a novel, set in Dallas Texas, with one of the central themes being the effect on the community of the Kennedy assassination. I read the first four chapters and it was truly inspiring writing. And then for six months, he wrote nothing. I asked him why, and he said that no matter how he tried, he couldn’t find details of aspects of the Presidential motorcade. He couldn’t continue with the story; he’d travelled to Texas and tried to find the details, but just couldn’t. So he was stymied.

I told him that he should make up the details; but he refused, saying that he had to write the truth or his novel would have no authenticity.

Make up stuff by all means, but it has to stay true to the genre in which you’re writing

My reality…..and this is a personal philosophy…..is that while a novelist can’t play games with the major events of history or life (such as inventing the Third World War unless you’re writing a dystopian futuristic novel, or that aliens have invaded Earth, unless it’s a science fiction fantasy), then the job of a novelist is to tell stories and if characters have to be invented, or situations created, or Presidential motorcycle cops ride Hondas and not Harleys….then so be it.

I’d love to hear what you think. Write to me and tell me.