Raw Material
Anyone who hangs out with professional writers for very long will eventually hear one of them say “I couldn’t get away with that in a novel” or “If I put that in a story, nobody would believe it,” and they’ll probably hear it sooner rather than later. It’s the bane of fiction writers everywhere. Years ago, I ran across a related anecdote that went something like this:
A professor of creative writing was giving a student comments – mostly negative – on the story he had just submitted. In particular, the professor had a number of things to say about the implausibility of the plot, the lack of apparent motivation for the character’s actions, and the unrealistic nature of specific events. The student got twitchier and twitchier, and finally burst out, “But that’s what really happened! It was just like that!”
The instructor looked at the student for a minute, and then said, “I believe you. But you still have to make me believe your story.”
Many writers use incidents from real life in their writing. “It really happened” is, however, a terrible justification for doing anything in a novel…if it’s the only justification for doing it. There are a number of reasons for this, first and foremost the fact that real life doesn’t have to have a coherent plot (or make any sense at all, actually).
A lot of beginning writers find this more than a little confusing. They have been told repeatedly that real life is material; if it’s material, then surely it should go into their stories! What they don’t realize is that real life is raw material. If you want to build a car, you don’t slap a bunch of iron ore, some sand, a rubber tree, and a couple of cows together and call it good; you have to take the raw materials and turn them into steel and glass and rubber and leather, and then into car parts and windshields and tires and seats, and then you have to put all those pieces together in the right places. Then you finally have a car.
Novels are a model of reality, not a transcription of it. Authors take the raw material of real life events and give it explanations and motivations and consequences, then turn it into characters and plot and put them together into a coherent story. Even the most realistic fiction doesn’t resemble real life anything like as closely as we pretend it does.
This is most obvious in dialog, where a word-for-word transcription of an actual conversation on a bus or at a restaurant will instantly demonstrate how different dialog is from the way most people actually talk, but it is just as true for every other aspect of a novel, from character complexity and motivation to plot twists.
For instance, take forgetting things. In real life, people forget important stuff all the time, from their car keys to their anniversary date. In fiction, one has less leeway, especially if the consequences of forgetting something are potentially fatal. “Ooops, I left my sword in my other scabbard” just doesn’t work in anything other than a really broad parody.
Real life doesn’t have to be convincing. It is just there, happening that way, whether we like it or not. Novels, on the other hand, are deliberately constructed. Every action, incident, character, and place in a novel is there because the author put it in, and on some level readers know it. It’s artificial, and that means the novel-writer has to do a bit more work to convince the reader that the story is “real,” compared to the journalist who can simply report a wildly unlikely event.
If something happens in a novel, we expect there to be an explanation, a reason, and a payoff, or why would the author bother to put it in? That’s why I started off saying that “it really happened” can’t be the only justification for putting something in a novel. There has to be a reason internal to the novel for that incident or description or whatever to be there; it has to have a payoff within the story. “Payoff” can mean that the incident starts or ends a chain of plot events, or that it results in a new discovery or a revelation of a character’s backstory, or even that it displays something new about the nature of the world the characters are living in, but whatever it is, it has to make sense in the context of the story.
“Making sense” is a matter of motivation and foreshadowing, setup and consequences – all the things that you may never know when it comes to a real-life incident. You may never know why a stranger came up to you in the hotel lobby and said “Will you hold my duck for ten minutes?” and handed you a duck, then disappeared for a while before coming back, thanking you, and giving you a ten-dollar bill, but if you put that in a book, you not only had better know who the stranger is and why he need somebody to take his duck for ten minutes, but you had better also make sure the reader finds out at some point what all that was about and why it was relevant to the main story you’re telling. Unless, of course, you are writing the sort of surreal novel in which that kind of thing is routine, but in that case the incident does “make sense” in the surreal world of your story, and may even have something to do with the three angels who are trying to catch a cab just outside the hotel.
