On The Right to Write Fiction

This issue is, to me, like bench pressing an SUV. I can’t quite figure out how to handle it and it frequently crushes me.

The issue: how can I write believable, honest fiction (oxymoron, but, you know) without having gone through extensive life experience?

Another way to put this: on the road to creating quality, credible fiction, where is that metaphorical fork where (1) imaginative, researched extrapolation and (2) relying on actual, personal experience must diverge, where the latter is the sole correct path to take? More importantly, does it even exist?

Explaining That Last Example, Since It Probably Only Made Things More Confusing

We must begin with the idea that fiction hasn’t actually happened. Otherwise, hello! Nonfiction. All fiction writers are making stuff up (duh) which means it has to be okay by rules of fiction-writing to make stuff up (duh).

Right. Let’s pretend I really want to write a story about, oh, like, High School Romance, which is a one hundred percent hypothetical situation of course. I have no personal experience with said situation. Please do not feel sorry for me though because it is totally okay and I’ve made peace with the whole thing.

Anyway, so I do my research. I hang out with, or otherwise gather information through a number of varyingly-appropriate means vis-à-vis some real-life kids who had or have a crazy soap-operatic high school romantic life. I read stories about high school romance. I watch movies (say A Walk To Remember, which is, like, THE GOLD STANDARD, right??) and TV episodes about high school romance, and so on and so forth.

Are these resources all I need to be able to write convincingly? Honestly? Poignantly enough to be worth a read? To offer something new or at least sufficiently wonder-inducing?

Or are my efforts, artificial by nature, doomed to become a cheap patchwork pastiche of all those prior second-hand experiences, filtered through my own inexperienced mind?

Or do I actually have more of a personal connection to the scenario than initially meets the eye? I was, after all, young once. Shouldn’t I be able to faithfully call to mind the deeper motivations and feelings that tend to drive Youthful Affection, regardless of its unrealized status (again, I’m okay with this) in my own life?

Am I credible? Or am I innately incredible, and not in the way that means “awesome”?

The Fantasy Caveat

In discussion of “credibility,” we are naturally ruling out the more highly imaginative aspects of Clear and Obvious Fantasy. Clear and Obvious Fantasy, however, gives us a good place to camp out and explore what we generally expect from fiction. So we’re going to pitch our tent, build our camp-fire, and cease and desist with this atrociously corny metaphor right now, okay, moving on.

For starters. You and I know nobody has ever lived in a magical land ruled by a half-elf king who rides literal fire-breathing unicorns, right? A good fantasy writer should be someone able to not only create a half-elf king, but also convince us whether we would or wouldn’t love him if we lived in that magical land of fire-breathing-unicorn-riding. The question becomes: does said writer have the necessary tools to conjure such a king? And does this half-elf king reveal anything to us (about half-elves, about humans, about ourselves, about the universe) worth revelation?

We give the “credible” stamp, then, to authors who manage to convince us that their story (1) remains viable in its world and (2) contains tangible value for ours. Consequently, said credible author would need details sufficient to convince us of the plausibility of this world and, to a certain extent, the realistic activity of its inhabitants. The plausible-details part is a product of research, but realistic activity of character requires something more: a marriage of empathy and experience.

Research, empathy, experience. I think I’m finally getting somewhere with this.

My Working Hypothesis: A Case Study

Okay, take drugs. Okay, that didn’t come out right. Okay, I did that on purpose. But you know what I mean.

It does no justice to reader or author or drug addicts to portray a story involving drugs inaccurately and carelessly. It adds no value to you or me or them.

However! I suggest that not having personally experienced the fight doesn’t rule out my ability to include, say, an ex-drug addict as a main character in my work.

To conjure a convincing world, I can take time and expend energy to depict an accurate setting of time and space. Read long articles. Get to know people with long roads and long stories behind them. Do plenty of research and then some. Etc.

Following, experience and empathy step in to fill in the how-people-work part of things. I can take what I know of myself and how I work and think and put myself in a situation. Then one of two things happens: either I use my own response, or I flip the whole thing and figure out how I would respond given different parameters. I take what this person or character dreams about or wants from life and substitute it for my own, and explore how that feels. Or vice versa.

Doing this requires a level of personal experience, to be sure. Not necessarily the specific experience of Being A Drug Addict so much as bigger, more general experiences, the kind that grip and grind and grow you and how you process emotion. Things, I guess, like falling in love, or having a kid, or losing a loved one, or finishing a degree. Things like getting into college. Winning a contest. Losing a debate. Traveling the world. Seeing social injustice first-hand. Battling and conquering a different addiction.

The list of things goes on, so many of which I haven’t done, but maybe more importantly, so many which I have.

So I Think I Can Write

I don’t have it down to a science. Show me someone who has and I’ll show you a half-elf king who rides on well you get the point.

Sure, having but one-and-twenty winters behind me (and not an altogether adventurous set at that), my fiction is sort of necessarily crippled on the ‘experience’ side of things. I’ll wager, though, that thinking through this whole thing means I’m somewhere on the way to getting this right, to writing stories that aren’t true but matter truthfully. To approaching fiction with a healthy respect for what it, and for that matter I, can and can’t do. And in the process, getting better at it.

We’ll call it one rep with the SUV. And one more corny metaphor for the discard pile.