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Blogs by Malcolm R. Campbell
How Much of Your Life is in Your Fiction 11/5/2009 8:36:26 AM
The autobiographies of some novelists often read like a James Bond novel. No wonder they have things to write about.
What about the rest of us? We've done a lot of living: it just doesn't make dramatic front page news. Yet, that living--on a quieter scale, perhaps--often finds its way into our books in various forms, usually with the names changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty.
The worst stuff and the best stuff are obviously dynamic for page-turner books. But a lot of tears and joys are tangled up with everyday, garden variety lifestyles. It's just as well we don't feel larger than life: how vain would that be! But we can ramp up the little things, fine-tune the middle of the road things, and cautiously use the more exciting messes we've gotten ourselves into.
By fictionalizing bits and pieces of our life's stories, we not only bring passion to our work, we bring honesty. We're telling it true because we've been there and we've experienced it. This sincerity comes across to the reader.
I set my novel "The Sun Singer" in Glacier National Park. Why? I wanted a mountain environment, so I picked a place I knew. I knew Glacier because I worked there at one of the resort hotels and had fallen in love with the place. Consequently, I had a sense of the place and also knew where to go to find any facts I was missing.
My protagonist in "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire" is a journalist. While I've done very little work as a journalist, my father was a journalist who taught reporting and editing at the college level; many of his friends were journalists and they were around the house a lot telling stories when I was growing up. I taught journalism for several years myself. So, it was natural to write about a reporter.
My yet-to-be-published novel "Garden of Heaven" is set, in part, aboard an aircraft carrier in the 1960s. You guessed it. I served on a carrier--as a Navy journalist, actually. Many of my experience aboard ship and in liberty ports have been fictionalized and placed in the novel.
I don't know whether everyone does this or not. Maybe their first kiss in in one of their books, and that's it. Maybe they had an argument with a math teacher, so they put that in. Or, perhaps their car ran off a snowy road during a long Wisconsin winter, so they put that in. Maybe it's one little thing here and another little thing there.
While my life will never read like a James Bond novel, I use myself as a source for a lot of stuff--and then I punch it up, so to speak, so it makes a good story. Maybe my novels represent the life it would have been fun to have lived.
More Blogs by Malcolm R. Campbell • How Much of Your Life is in Your Fiction - Thursday, November 5, 2009 • Stream of Consciousness - Friday, October 24, 2008 • Garden of Heaven' Website - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 • Loose Ends - Thursday, April 10, 2008
