Writing.Com General Discussion

If you are going to fictionalize real events, you need to recognize something: there are no stories in real life. There can be dramatic events, moments of peak emotion, whether joy, sorrow, fear or terror. One can find colorful characters in real life. But for the most part, real life is comprised of things happening. First this happens, then that happens, then these people do things. Then someone else does something. Maybe someone has a plan or a dream. Maybe something results from it; maybe not. But it’s all just a sequence of mostly unconnected phenomena. A talented historian or biographer can sift through the collection of raw experience and sometimes pull a narrative arc out of the random data. But not every collection of real life experience will lend itself to such a treatment.

So now we come to you and your obviously dramatic real life experiences. Is there a story lurking in the midst of the events you are drawing on? Ya got me. I’d venture a guess and say no, for no other reason than my opening observation: there are no stories in real life. This means that, while you may draw heavily on your experience, particularly to lend realism to your narrative, you owe history and truth absolutely nothing. You are writing fiction. That means your first and only responsibility is to your readers, and your only task is to keep them reading. That means you have to make think, at all times, “Gosh, I wonder what’s gonna happen next.”

In the furtherance of that goal, you are not only permitted to fabricate events, twist them around, create new events, and lie through your teeth, you are obligated to do so, if you want to craft the personal conflict, plot points and ongoing tension that will keep your readers turning the pages. That’s your job.

Of course, there is always the exceptional case. Yours may be such an example, in which case you might want to let the events speak for themselves in a non-fiction piece. But if fiction is the way you want to go, you’re going to have to, at some point, make stuff up.
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