On Writing True Fiction

For years, ever since the first writing workshop I conducted, I've called the kind of writing I do "True Fiction."

What does that mean exactly? It's the kind of fiction in which the character—or the muse via the characters—dictates the course of the story, as opposed to fiction in which the plot is carefully outlined according to formulaic rules. It's literary fiction vs. genre fiction. It's seat-of-the pants writing, character driven rather than plot driven. 

So why do I call it true. It's because I write to learn the truth—about a given issue, about life, and about myself and what I really believe, and about what is important.

Others have described this kind of writing in their own terms, and a host of writers employ it. The late Tony Hillerman once said in an interview that he does not outline his books. He tried it, but it never worked for him. His characters had their own ideas of how the story should go.

And that's how they are, in true fiction. Once you are in the heart and mind of your story's characters, they will tell you if you're not telling the truth about them—about what they would do, think, or feel. And that's what makes writing so much of an exciting adventure.

Ann Lamott said "You make up your characters, partly from experience, partly out of the thin air of the subconscious, and you need to feel committed to telling the exact truth about them, even though you are making them up."

And it works like magic, as long as you, as Ann Lamott says, "don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them."

It's what Jon Gardner was talking about when he said, "Art is as original and important as it is precisely because it does not start out with a clear knowledge of what it means to say. Out of the artist's imagination, as out of nature's inexhaustible well, pours one thing after another."

"The writer," Gardner says, "asks himself at every step, 'Would she really say that?' or 'Would he really throw the shoe?'"

Wallace Stegner declared, "It is fiction as truth that I am concered with."

Oakley Hall claims that "Truth, not fact, is the business of fiction."

And as I write my stories from the characters' perspectives, I agree. It is the best way I know to learn and convey the truth of what it is really like to face the serious and difficult issues that challenge the human spirit.

In my workshops on "Writing True Fiction" I will show you that you, too, can write fiction from a character's perspective.

Have ideas—will travel

author@janetmuirheadhill.com

How odd—wildlife attached to the underbelly of my car.

When I was parked along the street at my niece's house day before yesterday, someone asked me, "What are you dragging?" I didn't know what she was talking about until she pointed out what looked like a big piece of meat hanging from the back axle. And, as it turns out, that is what it was.

When I was driving through Wyoming in the wee hours Wednesday morning, I saw huge blood stains on the highway extending for about a quarter of a mile. What I didn't see until too late to swerve and miss it was the carcass of an elk. I'm pretty sure it was an elk judging from the color and size, though I couldn't see the head, just a brown heap. I turned enough that when I ran over it, it went under the right side of my minivan, just inside the tires. It whumped pretty loud as it hit the undercarriage but not enough to do any damage. I didn't even stop to look, as it was very dark and I didn't have a flashlight. The car drove just fine and I don't see any damage.

I drove my car to my sister's house, and using her garden hoe, lifted the substance from where it was draped over the back axle. When stretched out it was about a yard long and fanned out a foot or so wide—a piece of roughed up muscle and tendons and/or ligaments. My sister noticed splatters of blood on the hood of my car. "You sure you aren't the one who hit the elk first?" she teased. I wasn't, thank goodness. But it was a fresh kill, and probably by a big truck. If a car had hit it, the car would surely have been disabled and the occupants most likely injured, if not killed. Emergency vehicles would have been called, and the elk would have been removed from the middle of the lane.

That was the most interesting part of my mostly uneventful drive to Colorado, and one I'd pretty much forgotten until the evidence was found dragging under my car.

It reminded me, however, of a discovery the day before when I had my oil changed in Bozeman. The young man who did the work showed me what he'd found hanging near the oil pan. He thought at first that it was a rope or gasket of some kind. When he pulled on it, it broke off. He was amazed almost to the point of disbelief at what he saw, so he managed to get hold of the piece still hanging and fish out another length of it. "I tried to find the head, but couldn't," he told me.

It was a snake. A rattlesnake, I'm sure from the pattern on the skin. It was about as big around as my little finger and very dried out.

I cannot explain how it got there, or why it died there. I have found small rattlers near where I park my car a couple of times before. I usually just scoop them up with a shovel and carry them to a neighboring pasture a long way from the house and drop them into the soft grass so they can go about their lives.