A writer is surrounded by the rich material of the everyday. Overheard coversations wiggle into the dialogue of a short story. A funny encounter becomes a scene in a novella. A formative moment makes the foundation of a novel.
When I am writing nonfiction, which is most of the time, I don’t have to think too much about this. I tell the truth, as best as I can remember it and I acknowledge when my memory is hazy.
My mother asked me last week, ‘why do you write nonfiction?’ I had to pause and think. ‘Because in some ways, it allows me to be more creative than fiction. Yes, I have to me mindful of the facts, and tell the story how it unfolded, but it is all through the lens of my perspective. I feel like I have some authority’.
Fiction, or at least the fiction I write, always ends up being more difficult for me. Like many writers, I write what I know. What I know is my experience, my relationships, past, memories, experiences and what is deeply personal. I find it infinitely more difficult to take my truth and the truth of others and imagine into the page the correct adjustments. The kind of changes that draw it far enough away from reality to be fiction, but not so far that it doesn’t speak to the reader, not so adjusted that it fails to ring as reality.
This is all made me think a lot about Camus saying, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth”. That line between truth and reality, that barrier between nonfiction and fiction is not always so clear, not always as solid as we think. Even when I am writing fiction, is it possible that I am writing my truth, it just happens to only be me who can really perceive it as truth? In many ways, this might just be my own musings, trying to figure out how to write my book. So much of it I am taking from life, but I know, for it to be effective, it cannot be written as anything but fiction.
A Blog of One's Own 