Fact or Fiction?
"Every novel starts with a true story or experience..."
Hello everybody, today, as promised I am thrilled to welcome our very first guest blogger.
Jill Lanchbery has very kindly agreed to share her thoughts on writing an autobiography, as well as how fact and fiction often bleed into each other no matter what the project.
So, without further ado, here's Jill!
Painful project
A few years ago I wrote a memoir – Memory
of a Daughter.
It was a painful journey- the most painful writing project
I’ve ever undertaken, but a truthful one. Of course there is no obligation to stick to the absolute truth when you write autobiography - after all most of your potential readers will never know whether it’s a true account or not.
The truth was for me. I owed it to myself, to my integrity
as a writer, and so apart from the names, which had to be changed to protect identity,
it is a true and honest account.
Writing fact is completely different from writing
fiction. Apart from the odd article and a biography of my uncle the ballet
conductor John Lanchbery, I had only ever written fiction. It was my territory,
where I felt most comfortable.
I remember once being asked where I got my ideas for
my stories from. Were they figments of my imagination? Of course they are, but
then again, no they’re not, because each of my three published novels and the
fourth which I’m currently working on, started with a true story or experience
which formed the seed of the idea.
Nourishing the seed of an idea
An idea that swam around in my head while I
was in the shower or walking the dogs through the vineyards. It’s the
germination and nourishment of the seed, where fiction takes over and allows it
to flourish, leaving behind nothing but the husk.
Everybody
approaches writing in a different way. For some writers a totally organic
approach works – they simply sit down and write! But for most of us, we need
some sort of structure or overall plan – a basis for the organics to flourish.
Often first novels are based on personal experience.
For me the idea for A Bucket of Ashes, came
from the time I spent as a young wife and mother living in an enclosed British
enclave in Nigeria, and the “fish bowl” environment that it created.
Griefs and
Fears dropped into my lap. The
chance discovery that a family member had two half-brothers that he hadn’t
known existed was a fascinating starting point. An examination of blended
families.
The revelation that my grandfather had spent the last
twenty five years of his life in a mental institution, provided a plot for The Other Side of Silence.
Restraint and Responsibility
I’ve been lucky that so much grist has been added to my writer’s mill. A childhood spent in southern Africa, the peripatetic lifestyle of the wife of a man whose work took us to different countries. The years we spent in Northern Ireland during “The Troubles” providing that vital seed for my work in progress, The Things that Divide and the coincidence that our family moved into our new home in County Antrim, the same weekend as the Falls Road siege of 1970.
The difference between fact and fiction? Fact by its
very nature carries restraint and responsibility, but the writer owns fiction.
Want to find out more?
Thank you Jill - it's great to hear about other writer's processes and inspirations. If you want to check out more of her work, here's some links:
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