| Crafting Fiction: Keeping It Real, Part I |
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| Written by Alan Ackmann | ||||||||
| Monday, 06 October 2008 | ||||||||
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Every avid reader has that person (or those people) in their life they really wish would read more. Sometimes it’s a selfish desire, as we yearn to discuss the books we love with the people we love, and sometimes it’s altruistic; we want others to share in our joy. Whenever Christmas rolls around, I spend hours in bookstores looking for that one, perfectly selected book that will turn someone into a reader—it’s strangely evangelical, as though I’m out for a conversion. When I was in graduate school, a professor told me a story about such a desire. One Christmas, he bought his father a book set in the Ozark mountains—a setting very similar to where his father spent most of his life. I’ve forgotten the name of the book, if I ever knew it at all, but his father read it, and my old professor was no doubt hoping for the best when he asked the old man for his thoughts. I’m glad to report they were positive. His father’s opening compliment: “Sunofabitch sure knows his mules.” This, I’m led to believe, qualified as effusive praise. There’s an important lesson here, I think, about one of the things readers value most, but writers often curiously dismiss: factual authenticity. Many writers place a high premium on emotional authenticity—whether a character’s actions feel believable—but pay little heed to good old fashioned worldly accuracy. I’ve had countless authors submit to Relief whose cover letters contained things like: “I took some liberties with the history / science / politics / geography / scripture” and their argument is always the same: that’s why it’s called fiction. There’s a perception, a false one, I think, that writers can warp the details if it suits their purposes. I’ve had workshop leaders wave off comments about factual details with a dismissive, “Oh, come now—you don’t need to care about those things,” and it troubles me because readers seem to care about them so much. Even the opening notes to Richard Bausch’s Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea contain this sentiment: “This is a work of fiction. I made everything up except the facts and the politics, which everyone knows are of little importance.” I love Bausch’s work, and suspect a tongue in cheek quality to his assertion, but it still seems like writers careening valiantly over the facts bothers me more than it does most people. I suspect it’s my background. I was a history major for a brief period in college, and gained a great affection for historical trivia, and a great disdain for writers who opportunistically embrace some facts but disregard others. For me, though, it’s a not just a question of bespectacled fussiness; it’s a question of trust. My professor’s father liked the book that he was given, among other reasons, because the writer got the details right—the mules, one can assume, behaved in believable ways and were credibly presented to someone who knew that subject well. And because the writer respected his material enough to treat it carefully, the reader respected the writer and was more willing to embrace the story that he had to tell. Winning a reader over is one of the hardest things for a writer to accomplish, and one of the best ways to do it is to show a reader that you value the same things they do. Besides, as most writers know, one of the most irritating games that readers (whatever their training) like to play is “Spot the Anachronism”. I’ve had workshop readers tell me the VW Beatle my character drives wasn’t manufactured when I said it was, or that my description of a cancer treatment wasn’t completely right. My favorite moment came a few summers ago, when I gave a reading in Tennessee for a group of writers I desperately wanted to impress. The story was a hit, and I got a lot of compliments. But there was also an older man who came up afterwards, shook my hand, and told me I’d gotten a date wrong in the civil war. When he said it, he was grinning. Stuff like that can really rile your dander. Is factual accuracy the most important thing? Of course not. It falls below characterization, conflict, emotionally compelling situations, clear prose, authorial humility, and lots of other things. I’m not even sure it would crack my top ten, to tell you the truth. Unless detail oriented facts make up a crucial plot point, they are secondary concerns, ranking somewhere below stylistic sentence variety and somewhere above grammatical correctness. Okay, maybe not that far down. But it’s important nonetheless. As with all things, though, there are ways to focus on the factual details well and ways to do it poorly. In the next entry for our “crafting fiction” series, which will be posted two weeks from today, I’ll highlight some of the common pitfalls with this concept and present some authors who, in my opinion, do it well. Hope to see you there.
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3.20 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."          |
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Fiction Editor Alan Ackmann shares some thoughts on why authors should concern themselves with the details.| < Prev | Next > |
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