Sometimes, I’ll be discussing a story in workshop, and several people will remark that a particular episode seems unbelievable.

“I just don’t believe that Michael would stab Fran for saying that he had halitosis,” one student will say.

“I agree completely,” says another student.

The rest of the class nods.

At this point I look in the direction of the author and see that he has this smug look on his face, and I know what he’s going to say next.

“But it really happened!” he says with an air of superiority, as though he’s just pulled one over on us.

“It doesn’t matter if it really happened,” I explain as patiently as possible. “The question to ask is, ‘Is it believable?’ The worst defense a writer can use is the excuse, ‘But it really happened!’”

The fact that something really happened does not make it good fiction. In fact, it’s irrelevant, at least in terms of the story’s quality. Plenty of things happen in real life that just don’t seem believable on the page. On the other hand, the fact that it really happened shouldn’t exclude the material from one’s writing. The trick, of course, comes in molding the factual material to the specifications of one’s fictional world.

With any kind of fiction, there are basically two ways to incorporate your real-life experiences. Either you write a story based on something that happened to you, or you write a largely imagined story, with snippets from your life woven into the basic fabric of the story. You might set your novel during the last ice age, and your main characters might be a family of irritable mastodons. But the main mastodon, the way he chews his food with his mouth open, might clearly portray your father. In this way, every novel is based on real life. It’s nearly impossible to stop our real lives from intruding into our fiction, even when the story is clearly not about ourselves.

We can even see real life bleeding into the fictional world of a writer as absurdist as Samuel Beckett. In a letter to a friend, he wrote of watching old men in the park flying kites “immense distances” and “right out of sight,” and how transfixed he was by the sight. “My next old man or old young man [meaning his next character in a fictional work] must be a kite flier,” he wrote. At the time, Beckett was working on his novel Murphy, and true to his word, he included the following scene in which an old man is lying in bed, imagining himself flying a kite. Note the similarities between the wording in the letter and that of the scene:

 “Before you go,” said Mr. Kelly, “you might hand me the tail of my kite. Some tassels have come adrift.”

Celia went to the cupboard where he kept his kite, took out the tail and loose tassels and brought them over to the bed.

“As you say,” said Mr. Kelly, “hark to the wind. I shall fly her out of sight tomorrow.”

He fumbled vaguely at the coils of the tail. Already he was in position, straining his eyes for the speck that was he, digging in his heels against the immense pull skyward. Celia kissed him and left him.

“God willing,” said Mr. Kelly, “right out of sight.”

I think that’s a marvelous scene. You don’t have to know anything about the book to feel the richness of this image of an old man lying in bed, pretending to fly his kite. Later in the book, Celia looks for Mr. Kelly in the park where the other old men are flying their kites. Beckett has transformed his real-life experience in the way all good fiction writers do: building on the initial image, stretching it, exaggerating it, seeing how far he can take it.

From Turning Life into Fiction. Expanded edition copyright 2006 by Robin Hemley. All rights reserved.