What Does Fiction Owe Real Life? 2 Ways Of Writing About Emotional Reality
- Oct 11, 2014
- 2 min read
It was an orange jump suit that got me thinking about the relationship of art to reality. I know a strange connection to make but often the brain’s inadvertent firing of electrons can result in weird miraculous thoughts like that.
We were filming a trailer sequence for my film, A Thousand Bayonets where the main character, John Webster, is captured by a group of bad guys and he doesn’t know if the minutes we are watching will be the last on this Earth.
One of the film’s producers suggested we put the hero, a journalist, in an orange jump suit just like the American and British citizens who were hideously murdered on video which were posted on the internet.
This tied the film trailer with real events that were occurring in the Middle East. Through this vehicle we have forced a mirror onto the truth. The truth is not something easily digestible and we naturally turn away from it so we sometimes need fictional avenues for people to realize what is behind events; they force us to look at a deeper truth.
As a journalist turned fiction writer I have dealt with both sides of the equation and which, I suppose, is one of those eternal questions: what does fiction actually owe to fact?
Some writers and readers might argue nothing at all. Fiction is the purest form of entertainment and of escapism and shouldn’t be confused or intertwined with reality. It is there merely to avoid the doldrums of everyday life and the hardships that come along with it.
But even those harlequin romances that are often derided for their false portrayal of love and sex still have a root in emotional reality. Under all those images of exposed flesh and doey-eyed looks is a single commonalty that we are our baser instincts.
Most screenwriters will tell you that they take liberties with any film ‘based on real events’. But if they do it right, the core truths of the story will still be intact, even if they shift plots, make up characters and invent details.
And that is what’s important.
The best writers believe that fiction should in some way reflect the complex reality and human condition that through everyday events make up our world.
There are basically two ways of doing this. The first is to provide commentary on the world around us. Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were masters at this. Also, the writers of the Lost Generation particularly come to mind, writers like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, John Dos Passos and though arriving much later, John Cheever might be considered the heir of the Lost Generation.
The second way is to provide a glimpse into what the world looks like through another person’s eyes. I think in modern times, Murakami is the best at this. His world is sometimes fanciful, for example 1Q84, but it is always based on emotional reality. Murakami’s genus is that he shows how loneliness and disenchantment with relationships can effect a character even though his plots are sometimes outlandish.
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By Joel Mark Harris
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