My Writing Experince: The Truth Behind Fiction

Stranger than Fiction

No, I'm not referring to the Chuck Palahniuk collection of essays by the same title or the Will Ferrell movie. What I'm speaking of is the tendency of fiction writers to include "true" or "real" aspects of their life in their writing. In Tijuana Dust, this concern arose when I began writing the main character of Martinez.
An integral kernel idea about the protagonist that guided some of his decision-making was his history as a drug runner for the Mexican mafia. Naturally this isn't an autobiographical element which I worked into the story; truth be told, I see more of myself in the Chuck Lord journalist character given my experience contributing to a San Diego weekly paper. However, I had met someone during college, a friend of a friend who was perpetually surfing couches in Santa Barbara, who said he couldn't get his own place because he had gotten mixed up with some unsavory folks in Tijuana.

In reality, I didn't trust much of the guy's story, but I had to admit I could see its persuasive appeal to an ethos that a lot of college kids weren't likely to question. But this brings me back to the question of 'how much of reality/facts from life do you insert into fiction?' I ask this as something of an ethical question because fiction is the genre people will tell you to 'write what you know'; however, you don't want to put so much of your life or the truth of those around you so that you betray the trust of friends and family--in a lot of intro to creative writing classes, there are warnings against the thinly-veiled memoirs that are nearly impossible to workshop--inevitably the writer will respond with something to the effect of "even though someone said this plot element didn't make sense, it really happened that way."

And this leads back to this issue of stranger than fiction. What I think most people are criticizing when they point out these kinds of plot issues is that the story does not meet some expectation presented earlier in the story. I've heard different interpretations of red herrings, but I knew one writer who said, "If you put a gun in the living room on the first page, that's a red herring, meaning that gun is going to get shot by the end." Red herrings are often used to throw people off, but in the context of the writer's point, he was getting at the fact that fiction relies on a certain contract between writer and reader for a story to conform to some expectation or follow some agreed upon rules. So when someone says, "this part of the plot didn't ring true" what they're really saying is "this might very well be true, but it hasn't been crafted enough to meet the reality within the story."

A link to a previous post I wrote quoting Palahniuk's Stranger than Fiction based on my experience at a writer's conference with agent-writer pitch sessions.
http://cruzwriting.blogspot.com/2008/10/bookexpo-writers-conference-08.html

Source: http://cruzwriting.blogspot.com/2011/07/truth-behind-fiction.html

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