Where does fiction part from reality? Authors answer
- rjpostauthor
- Aug 16, 2023
- 4 min read
Who was the real Holly Golightly? A German refugee? Gloria Vanderbilt? Marilyn Monroe? Just Google the question, and you’ll find no shortage of articles offering myriad theories on the subject.
How about Huckleberry Finn or Severus Snape? Were they “real” people, too? Where does truth end and fiction begin, and does it really matter?
To get a handle on those conundrums, I asked four authors how much their real lives and real people impact their works of fiction.
Experience vs. memoir
Depending on your age and your proclivity for late-night television, you may remember the opening lines of “Dragnet”: “The story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.”
But most authors don’t take the Joe Friday approach to writing.
“My fiction isn’t based on my life like a memoir where I'm retelling the events with the names and dates changed,” said Kelly Brakenhoff, author of the Cassandra Sato Mysteries for adults and the Duke the Deaf Dog ASL Series for children.
“I'm a huge people watcher and super curious about my surroundings,” she said. “My fiction may start from real-life people I've seen or encountered. But then I put them in other situations or make other events happen to them to come up with a new story.”
Barry Forbes, author of the Mystery Searchers Series for teens and tweens, said “not much” of his fiction is based on his own life, but some is influenced by real events.
Of the 12 books in the series, he said, “Some of them are pure fiction that came out of my mind. Four of them touch on real events that I read about or was told about. Then I built the stories inside other fictional events and locations.”
Still, as people living in the real world, it’s difficult to keep that entirely out of the worlds we create.
“Although I had no such concept as I set out to be a writer, it seems in retrospect that my stories rely more than I care to admit upon past experience,” said Mark Miller, whose short story collections include “In Bright Sunshine” and “In Cool Shade.”
“Maybe I adhere closely to that old advice, ‘Write what you know,’” he said. “I probably know myself better than most other things.”
Drawn from real life … sort of
So does that mean that characters in our books are really people we know? As they used to say on Facebook, it’s complicated.
Tasha Hackett writes the Hearts of the Midwest Series, including the recently released “Wildflower on the Prairie.” She said a character can resemble someone from her own life in many ways but still be fictional.
“In my first book (‘Bluebird on the Prairie’), I based a side character directly off of my brother-in-law. I matched his physical description and basic personality and even a few direct quotes to things I'd overheard my brother-in-law say,” Hackett said. “But the character in my book is still a made-up character from my imagination. Even if a character is modeled after a real person, as an author, I can only write what I see and hear from this person.
“Everything we authors create, I believe, is influenced by our own experiences of people we meet. We get ideas from real people,” she said.
“When I create a character, I try to mold the character around people I know or have known,” Forbes said. “I find that helps to fill in detail. It's very loose but helpful.”
Both Miller and Brakenhoff said characters often result from a blend of bits and pieces of people they’ve encountered.
“The characters I create are usually a mixture of several people I've met — mannerisms, biases, physical traits — and I put them together to form, hopefully, interesting and believable human beings,” Miller said.
“I blend different characteristics of people I know like their accent, their origin story or a specific detail of how they eat a hamburger,” Brakenhoff said. “I mash all of those things together to make a new character who hopefully doesn't resemble someone I know in real life too closely.”
My protagonist, myself?
What about a writer’s own mannerisms or characteristics? Do they ever find their way into fictional form?
“A character might be based on my experiences. However, he is not really me,” Miller said. “I am uncomfortable getting that personal, and I'm truly not all that interesting.”
“I do like to point out that my characters are not me, but I understand them,” Hackett said. “One character, Eloise, is not me, but I understand and relate to some of the trials she experienced.
“I am writing a contemporary story right now where I have put my entire personality into my main girl, so the world is about to see into my head, but again, she's still a character,” Hackett said. “Maybe she's got my personality, but her history, experiences and the trajectory of her life is different. She's a version of what I might have become if I'd been in her shoes.”
Finding the truth in fiction
So why do some readers write letters to Shakespeare’s Juliet or get hung up on how much of “The Waltons” was real? Why do they grasp for truth in what they know is fiction?
If readers want stories to be true, Forbes said, “I'd guess that — in the case of mysteries and adventures — they find the stories more exciting than real life.”
“Most readers seek verisimilitude, the feeling of truthfulness, of things being real,” Miller said. “I like to add what I call ‘touchstones’ to my writing, small blurbs of commonplace lives or items that the reader can respond to with a comfortable sense of, ‘I know that.’”
“If it's the kind of book that makes you sigh at the end and all is right with the world, why wouldn't you want that to be real?” Hackett asked. “I'd like to believe every story has truth in it. If it doesn't, it's not worth my time.”
I’d like to extend special thanks to the great authors who took time out of their busy schedules to help me explore this issue. You can learn more about them and their books at:
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