Fictionalizing Your Real-Life Story
We said a few posts ago that sometimes we, as writers, have to tart real life up.
Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker on the evaporator farm on Tatooine
Real life is too ordinary.
It’s too interior.
It’s too boring.
We have to heighten the drama, ramp up the stakes. Otherwise readers won’t care.
But how, exactly, do we perform this wizardry?
Do we just dream up wild stuff—sex, violence, zombies—and hurl it into the stew willy-nilly?
How do we know what’s appropriate?
How can we tell when we’ve gone too far?
The answer brings me back to my favorite subject: theme.
The principle is:
We may fictionalize but only on-theme.
I was watching the movie Midnight Special (2016) last night. Have you seen it? It’s good. The film stars Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, and Adam Driver. The plot follows a young boy who possesses mysterious powers as he flees apocalyptic cultists and the NSA, protected by his father. I won’t spoil the climax for you except to say that it is wildly fictionalized … and it works completely.
Why?
Because the filmmakers fictionalized on-theme.
Midnight Special is about a father’s love for his son and the passage the father must endure to face ultimate separation. That’s the core. That’s what the story’s really about.
Michael Shannon and Jaeden Lieberher in “Midnight Special”
An alternative version could have been told very simply: a special young boy gets sick and dies, despite heroic efforts to save him by his father and mother. Perhaps that was the real story from which Midnight Special evolved.
The filmmakers ramped up the tale’s power by making the boy special special special, i.e. possessed of powers that can bring satellites down out of the sky and cause the entire US government to chase him halfway across the country.
We may fictionalize all we want, as long as we stay on-theme.
When Ernest Hemingway gave Jake Barnes, his fictional protagonist in The Sun Also Rises, an emasculating war wound, he was heightening reality indeed. But that heightened reality was 100% on-theme.
The theme of The Sun Also Rises is the soul-devastation that the horrors of WWI wreaked upon Hemingway’s “Lost Generation” contemporaries. Hence the wound.
There’s a storytelling axiom in Hollywood:
If horses can fly, you’ve got a story. If everything can fly, you’ve got a mess.
When we fictionalize on-theme, we heighten the drama legitimately. When we make sh*t up off-theme, we just produce craziness.
The first principle we talked about in this series was
Make the internal external
Or put another way
Make the invisible visible.
We can make ourselves cowboys or princesses or private eyes as long as that external story is on-theme with our real-life internal one.
What was Rocky but Sylvester Stallone’s fictionalized-on-theme rendition of his own struggles as an unknown trying to get noticed in the movie biz?
What was Luke Skywalker’s journey from the evaporator farm on Tatooine to saving the galaxy as a Jedi knight, except George Lucas’ own odyssey from his boyhood in Modesto, California to entertainment immortality? For that matter, what was American Grafitti?
Fictionalize as much as you want, but keep it on-theme.
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Insightful and inspirational message, thank-you for this point. I'll add that it seems many writers find great success through fiction because they retain the core thematic message that produced success throughout their careers. Steven Speilberg returns again and again to the theme of the neglectful redeeming father. In Jaws, Brody feels responsible for the girl's death so he sets on a course to destroy the shark. In E.T., the family is without a father, and E.T. becomes like a new father for the boy and can only "go home" once the mom and the good scientist are together. Same goes for Schindler's List which has Schindler changing from a profiteer to a father-figure saving the Jews. Empire of the Sun with John Malkovich, Last Crusade with Sean Connery and Jurassic Park with Sam Neil's character learning to become a caring and protective 'father' of the children are other notable instances. Even the War of the Worlds sees Tom Cruise's character as a bad father redeemed by protecting the children from the alien invasion. I could go on, but this hidden motif in (not only) Spielberg's films of the lost and regained paternal love and authority while not necessarily a contributing factor to the success of the aforementioned films is certainly a key theme upon which the various stories are structured and the reason we are left feeling warm and fuzzy by the end.
