Imagination doesn’t negate the truth

Writers are a lot like actors.

They need to be able to draw on their own experiences to understand others. And to express these in a compelling way that enables their audience (or readers) to believe in them.

Just to draw out last week’s theme a little more, this means that writers – novelists and non-fiction writers –are equally in the business of seeking out the truth.

Just because novelists use their imagination, doesn’t mean they’re not exploring their inner selves, and their time and place in history.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez says: “There’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.” 

And Raymond Carver once said in an interview: “The fiction I’m most interested in has lines of reference to the real world. None of my stories really happened, of course. But there’s always something, some element, something said to me or that I witnessed, that may be the starting place.”

He believes that everything we write “is autobiographical”, in some way or another. Not in a simplistic way. Not in the way that brings many people to say: “But of course you spent your childhood on a farm in the Eastern Cape”, because my first book was set there.

He didn’t mean you have to stick close to “what really happened”. In fact, that can be a mistake. It can rob your work of the dramatic imperative.  You can lose sight of the narrative arc. And, as Kim Edwards wrote in an essay on characters,  it can also “rob a character of the freedom to react in a natural and individual way”.

Edwards interprets Carver’s comment this way: “… there’s a clear relationship between the events of the world and the events of a story. Art doesn’t imitate life but grows directly from it.

“Perhaps the most important truth to begin with is the authentic transfer of emotion from author to character.”

Edwards says that, even if she hasn’t experienced what a character does, she draws on parallel events and emotions in her own life. I do that too. But I also research heavily.

To create a character in my last book, who was a man, and who had experienced things that I never had, I read the books of people who had undergone similar experiences. I interviewed some of them at length. And I read the kind of books that would have formed the opinions and thoughts of my character.

In other words, as far as I was able, I tried to become him. I tried to climb inside his head and experience what he did. Then I could reach an intuitive sense of how he would react to any given situation.
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