Fiction isn’t falsehood, and history isn’t truth

“Fact” is trendy.

Non-fiction sells more than fiction. And when you talk to people about reading, they will often declare sternly that they prefer to “read facts”. They want to “learn” or “improve”, or whatever.

In fact, there’s not as much difference between the two as you might think. Say you’re writing a biography. You can’t access a person’s entire life. There are certain details you can’t substantiate.

Once you’ve finished your research, you can’t write their entire life. You pick what you consider to be the salient points. That means you will probably choose to highlight the anecdotes that illustrate what you believe to be the real person. In the end, it’s going to be a very subjective picture.

Modern creative non-fiction will also make use of the skills of fiction. In other words, you use art (or artifice) to make us care. Without art, fact can be dreary. We need the past reconstructed for it to become a credible truth.

Fiction writers believe they can reach a deeper truth. Man Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel said that her portrait of Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall was a novel – yet that gave her the freedom to present what she believed was a truer picture of the times than any history of the sixteenth century has managed.

Everything I write in my novels is researched - from the route my characters take to the cafe, to the loneliness of someone in the underground during the struggle years.

The things I write did happen – perhaps not to me, and perhaps not to the same people. I pull things together. I try to observe life closely.

So I see my novels as “true”. I try to give my characters life which I hope will reveal a time and place. Certainly as subjective a revelation as you’re likely to get from the choices of a non-fiction writer.
 
Here’s an example. A character in my last book (My Brother’s Book, Picador Africa) had been in the underground in his youth. I wanted to delve into what that did to him, and how it formed the person he became in our new society.

First I read a few memoirs of real people who had gone through these experiences. I wasn’t much the wiser. It’s not done, particularly for a man, to write about all those feelings. It sounds self-pitying. They left a lot unsaid.

So I arranged to interview a couple of them at length. In that forum, knowing they were helping me with a “character” rather writing about themselves, they poured out a depth of feeling that helped me construct a credible character. What I wrote was “true”. 

The difference between fiction and non-fiction lies in the contract between reader and writer. The novelist says they’re about to tell the reader something that may or may not have happened, while the non-fiction writer says they’re about to tell you something that “really did happen”.

We read a story differently if we believe it to be true. Yet fiction and non-fiction are inextricably linked. I believe it’s fruitless to draw hard distinctions between them.

Telling the “truth” presents the writer with the same ethical challenges – in fiction or non-fiction.

Fiction isn’t necessarily falsehood, just as history isn’t the truth. Hemingway said that all good novels were “truer than if they really happened”.
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