Adapt real life: Assignment for the week

Hi - below is a quick precis of what we covered last time. This week's assignment is 1) to take a real life experience and express it in one sentence, and 2) in a paragraph or two, re-work it and slot it into your novel, using your characters (much as we did in class).

 

Adapt real life

Can you just slot real life into fiction? I would say yes – but with modifications.

There are essential differences between what happens in life and what happens in books. You only have to look at what novels are for. They are there to entertain us, whereas real life is not often very entertaining. They create meaning, whereas real life often seems meaningless. They provide escape, but what are we trying to escape from? Real life, naturally.

Dramatic events such as car crashes and mafia hits may have happened in real life, but may still be weak in novelistic terms.

Here are some ways to adapt real life:

• Change the point of view. Make your real-life event happen to any of various characters in your novel and see how they respond. Remember, you should always have an eye on how the real-life event illuminates your character or contributes to the plot.
• Use any ‘found’ dialogue, but bear in mind that real dialogue is often circuitous, pointless, repetitive, and full of false starts and hesitations. Adapt it so that it illuminates character or moves the plot forward. If there’s no dialogue in your real story, include some.
• Make sure you look for the emotional angle. The books you have enjoyed the most almost certainly moved you in some way to wonder, terror, amusement, pity, excitement, etc. Aim to reproduce the same effects.
• Make your real-life story suspenseful by withholding details.
• Include conflicts between characters as a cause or result of the real-life event. In the car crash referred to above, for example, make the driver of the car the adulterous lover of the passenger. Invest events with significance.

In most cases, a novelist’s job is not to transcribe a ‘slice of life’ onto the page, unworked and unchanged. There is almost always the potential for improvement. Why else would people ‘embellish’ stories when they tell them? Don’t force yourself to keep to ‘what really happened’ out of loyalty to real life. A novel is not a biography or a newspaper article. It is a different beast, and satisfies different desires.

 

See you on Thursday,

Gary