Fiction: Drawing from Real Life: guest post by Gretchen Shirm [08.09.2010]

The relationship between fiction and real life has always been uncomfortable territory for writers. It is perhaps the fact that most writers cannot explain exactly where fiction comes from that makes the fiction/real life delineation so fascinating to non-writers.

I’ve just finished reading Claire Tomalin’s compelling biography Thomas Hardy: Time Torn Man. In it, she cites Hardy as denying any autobiographical link between himself and the protagonist of Jude the Obscure (Hardy’s last and by far his darkest novel). Yeah right, I thought when I read that, not autobiographical Tom, not at all.

But then I thought, hold on. Yes, there are superficial links between Jude and Thomas Hardy – Jude was, like Hardy, born in a village, unable to study at Oxford and felt himself constrained by an unhappy marriage. But for those similarities between Jude and Hardy, there are many more horrors suffered by Jude removed from Hardy’s own experience. Jude seems real because Hardy invests so much of himself in Jude; that is not autobiography, it is the mark of a good storyteller.

Superficially, similar comparisons could be made between myself and the characters in Having Cried Wolf, my debut collection of stories published this month. In it, there is a character who is, like me, a lawyer and also like me, grew up in a small coastal town (in my case two coastal towns). But nothing that happens to that character has ever happened to me; nor has anything that happens in the book. And still, somehow, I am in the book.

Virginia Woolf described fiction as ‘like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.’ Fiction isn’t life, but about life. Readers expect fiction to have the quality of real life, but it has to be wound around a central spool of narrative. The biggest buzz I get from being a fiction writer is creating a story; making something that was not there before.

The truth is that a well realised character is created by an author using a part of him or herself: Hardy nursed a life-long bitterness from never having studied at university, and Jude the Obscure manifests this. Becoming a fiction writer is to learn how to mine layers of feeling, to understand characters by filtering them through oneself.

It isn’t just feelings and attributes that fiction writers use to render their fiction life-like: place is an important element of fiction writing. The experience I have when reading a good book is that the action somehow takes place in a location that is familiar to me. My theory is that when writers use places they know, this familiarity triggers the reader’s own memories. It is for this reason that I didn’t make Kinsale either of the towns I had grown up in (Kiama or Ballina) because as I was writing, the stories were grafted onto many different places I was familiar with – sometimes Kiama, sometimes Ballina and even Sydney, Newcastle and Melbourne.

I can understand why comparisons between himself and Jude annoyed Hardy, just as I can understand why all fiction writers bristle at the suggestion that their work is autobiographical. To suggest that a fiction writer has taken from their life is almost to suggest they have in some way cheated. But the truth is, it’s a compliment: it means that the writer has woven their fiction from strands of themself.

Gretchen Shirm was born on Kiama, on the south coast of New South Wales, in 1979. She currently lives in Sydney, where she works as a lawyer. In 2009, Gretchen received the D.J. O'Hern Memorial Fellowship for Emergent Writers. Her fiction has been published in numerous literary journals. Having Cried Wolf is her first collection.

Thanks to Affirm Press, SPLOG has two copies of Gretchen Shirm’s Having Cried Wolf to give away. To win, simply email us the names of the other three collections In Affirm Press' Long Story Shorts series. (hint: you can find them here).

Entries close midday, Friday 10th September with winners announced that afternoon as selected from the entries received. Having Cried Wolf* is available from all good bookstores, and you can also read a sample chapter here (the link is on the bottom right of the page).

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