6 Ways to Turn Real Life into Fantastic Fiction
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When people read my story collection, Hunger Moon, they often ask—how much of it is real? It’s a funny question because my stories are fiction. Yet my fiction is heavily influenced by my life experiences.
Did I ever fall in love with a man who played sitar and lived with a boa constrictor? No — but I did visit a strange mansion in Toronto that housed skulls and snakes. Did I hike along a promontory under the hot Australian sun? Yes — but I didn’t get stuck or injured there. Did I feel loneliness and regret as a young new mother? You bet.
The challenge in writing fiction that’s rooted in so-called reality is that, as writers, we have a hard time letting go of “what really happened.” This is especially true if your main character, or narrator, is based too closely on yourself. This can lead you to a story that feels like it’s going nowhere. It flattens, deflates, becomes more anecdotal than character arc.
Listen: real life absolutely provides a rich source for stories. Some days I’m astounded by the sheer abundance of story possibilities that surround me. But they’re rarely delivered whole cloth; they require a lot of tinkering to transform them into true fiction.
Here are a few ways you can tinker with reality in your prose:
1. Mix & Match Your Story Elements
Remember those flip books for kids?
Each page is divided in three, so you can flip and arrange each page and — presto! — you’ve got an alligator head, an elephant torso, and giraffe legs.
I’m not suggesting you go slicing your pages in three — or make weird composite creatures — but I am suggesting you consider mixing and matching different elements of your story.
For example: if your story “really happened” in Calgary, can you move it to the coast? Or if it “really happened” at a beach, can you move it to the forest?
When you relocate the narrative, your brain has to reach for probabilities beyond what actually happened and create something new.
You can do this with other elements, too. Time, for instance.
If it “really happened” in summer, switch seasons. Or decades — 1989 becomes 1999 — and the sensibilities and possibilities shift.
Once you start mixing up one or two of the elements, your fiction has room to breathe, to become more itself — and less of reality.
2. Mash It Up
Mash-up is similar to mix and match, but there’s an important difference.
Take two or three disparate events that “really happened” at different times in your life, and mash them together into one story.
Maybe there’s a house fire you’re wanting to write about. What other events or happenings could weave into the narrative?
The time your dad’s back went into crazy spasms. Or when your sister saved up for a pony. Or the first time you fell in love. Blending these into the original house fire idea can offset the need to report what “really happened” and spark more fictive components — like tension and plot.
3. Adopt an Alter Ego
Part of the challenge of writing fiction about something that happened to you is that you become the central character. You’re the narrator and/or protagonist … but you’re also not. Can you adopt parts of your alter ego and weave them into your main character? Maybe wear an article of clothing you’d never wear. Say something you wish you’d said.
On a quieter note, you may just borrow a hobby or activity that influenced a friend or family member, and let it be central to your narrator’s life instead.
Once I wrote about a character who did ballet. I never took ballet lessons — but my sister did. Mashing this activity into my protagonist’s life, made her less me and more her own person.
4. Switch Up Your Character’s Central Desire
A couple of years ago, I wrote a story about a fictional mother. The story is based on my own mother’s life (she said it was weird to read it), and I wasn’t trying to hide that fact.
But I was playing with an omniscient first-person narrator, and I needed to make the story work as a piece of fiction. So, I gave the mother character a desire my actual mother did not have. In this case — it was to fly. It allowed me to write what would become the central thread of the story, allowing me to deviate away from the facts.
So, if you’ve got a story to tell about a real event, what inner truths can you shift into fiction?
Can you amplify your character’s central desire? Or exaggerate your character’s deepest psychic wounds?
Shifting the inner landscape of the character will alert you to deeper motivations and give you a clearer sense of a character arc — which is central to fiction, but not so much in real life.
5. Harness the Power of Third Person
One of my favourite exercises comes from an old writing book by Dorthea Brande called Becoming a Writer. She suggests you write about what happened to you yesterday, but in the third person.
This exercise has served me over and over again. Plus, it’s given me more story beginnings than I’ll ever finish (and some that I have!).
Now, you don’t have to write about what “happened to you yesterday.” But try writing the “real life” story from the third person (or even the second!). You’ll get a little bit of distance from the events, becoming more like a witness than a participant.
This distance allows for unexpected fictional elements to pop into your imaginational field and invite them into your story.
6. Add a Sprinkle of Strangeness
Kaleidoscopes always fascinated me as a kid. Spin the wheel a quarter turn and the whole image inside shifts.
This can work in helping you transform what “really happened” into fiction as well.
A love story where the love interest — perhaps based on a human being in your world — becomes an AI being in the fictional world. Or there’s an eerie moment where everyone in town levitates. Or a strange substance flows from the kitchen tap. Or a parrot who speaks the idioms of a recently deceased parent.
An altered reality can break apart the real one. Plus you may find yourself having fun reconstructing it through this fictional kaleidoscope.
Life is full of stories. But lifting these stories from life, and turning them into art? That’s your job, dear writer. Go forth!
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Traci Skuce is a devoted writer and story midwife. Her own short story collection, Hunger Moon (NeWest Press, 2020), was recently shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writers’ Prize. She helps fiction and memoir writers birth and finish their stories so they can get their manuscripts out into the world.
To learn more about Traci, visit her website and join her Facebook group.
