Friday, January 06, 2006
Too True For Fiction?
A friend of mine has a brother who swears he speaks Spanish, when in truth what he does is prattle Spanish-sounding gibberish. He says that his sister-in-law, a Puerto Rican, doesn't understand his Spanish because she's lived among Anglos too long. The guy's not brain-damaged, and in every other way except that he votes Republican, he's a normal human being. But he insists that he's speaking Spanish when he is not.
Now, if I put this in a story, I imagine more than a few people would say, "That's not believable." To those readers, my insistence that the guy actually exists would be moot.
In The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien manipulates what's true versus what actually happened until the reader has to consider what it is that makes a true story true and how fiction can be more honest than fact. He mixes fact and fiction so adroitly, constantly retelling the central story, that what actually happened no longer matters. The story is true to the time, the place, the people, and the event, even if it isn't solid, proveable fact.
We've seen reporters succumb to telling fictions to illuminate a story, and in those cases they've violated the Truth In Labeling law, if not the truth of the story. As writers of fiction, we have to draw on life for our made-up stories, and in my case, I lifted a real person out of my experience for a character in Panamanaian Moon. I changed little but his name, and he's probably the largest character in the book, much larger than the characters I made up.
So I'm curious, as storytellers, have you written something as it actually happened only to have readers not buy it? Conversely, have you ever made up a scene or character that is so real that your readers insist you took it from real life? If you use a real person, how much can you use without violating that person's privacy, or your friendship?
And what the hell is truth anyway?