By Lynn Michell and Juliet Bates
Lynn Michell:
Fiction is a strange bird. It can nest in a box close to home where it observes, remembers and notes everything that happens, or it can fly wild in the skies to look keen-eyed on the scenes below or to focus on something small and detailed. Or it can leave the earth’s boundaries altogether to dream fantastic scenes of pure imagination.
After reading much about using personal experience in fiction, I have come to the conclusion that there are no rules and no standard way of doing it. A gifted writer can transform the personal or leave it alone. Either way, we are talking about the craft of writing. As a publisher, many submissions that come in to Linen Press are thinly veiled accounts of a personal life story. They tend to be superficial and one dimensional; interesting to the writer but not to many readers. They narrate ‘this happened to me’ without the surprises that come from a creative imagination. They are single track stories and read more like accounts or disguised memoir than fiction.
Good writers have the gift of transforming experience, if they choose, into narrative and know which events and which characters can be convincingly moved into their novels. They know how much to change, to transform, to disguise. We all borrow from our memories, but while some of us draw heavily on our past, others bypass their own experiences, finding satisfaction in inventing new worlds which they inhabit while they write.
The books on the Linen Press list vary from an exquisite memoir by Marjorie Wilson, based exactly on vignettes from her own life at the turn of the century, to a novel by Juliet Bates in which almost everything is imagined. She has written her own comments below. The Device, The Devil & Me cleverly transforms personal experience and knits it up into a tense and finely structured novel. Stephanie Taylor uses black humour and suspense to transform the personal into fiction – and it works. Hema Macherla is a born story teller. Her plots are complex and her characters utterly credible. What she borrows for her writing is her personal knowledge of India – its landscape, its customs, its architecture and the wonderful aromas of Indian cooking. My own novel, White Lies, includes a few sections, set in the present, that are unashamedly based on my own experiences. The rest is made up except for snippets of conversation remembered from childhood and images from the past which I have used because they are so vivid. My experience of writing is that it just happens. Once a novel is on its way, it starts to write itself. I can’t explain the process any more than I can articulate how I ride a bicycle.
Juliet Bates:
A few years ago I was invited to read one of my short stories at a magazine launch in London. The story was fantastical, a fairy tale about jewelled birds, a cruel explorer and a lovelorn woman. After the reading, a member of the audience came up to me and asked whether the story was autobiographical. I think she hoped that what I had just read was true, that I would recount an unhappy love affair, or the discovery of a pair of pearl studded birds. When I told her the story was complete fiction, she drifted back into the crowd, disappointed.
Why do we need things to be true? Why is a story validated by it’s connection to real events? I merely make things up. For me, that’s where the fun lies, in inventing characters and situations. Of course, I can’t deny that there are echos of real places. In The Missing, the house at Bluewood and the creek are not in the United States, but in Suffolk, and the descriptions of Paris are based on what I saw and how I felt about the city when I lived there. Then there are the characters. Dagirov and Irina are loosely based on a couple I knew when I was a student in Bristol, and I suppose there are moments in the novel when Frances is me. Ania was borrowed, however. She is, in fact, a character from Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. You will find her – a Polish countess – towards the end of the film with her husky voice and red hair. This is exactly how I imagine Ania to sound and to look. And if I were to cast Pivkin for a film of The Missing, I would chose Peter Lorre at his most ingratiating and goggle eyed.
There is one real event in The Missing, the scene where Dagirov flattens the mouse with his boot. Standing, waiting for a metro at the Arts et Métiers station, I saw a heavy, moustachioed man do precisely the same thing. I was so sickened by the scene that I decided I would find a way of integrating it into the novel. That’s the great thing about fiction, you can write what you like.