A case could be made that many, many books and movies are about one thing and one thing only: getting Person X to say to Person Y, “I love you.” The trick is our characters can never use those blatant, overt words. That wouldn’t be cool. It wouldn’t ring true to life. And it wouldn’t possess the power and the impact we want. In fiction, “I love you” has to come in subtext, not text. Here’s one of the ways William Goldman did it in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It’s the final scene. The outlaws are shot up…

  We said a few posts ago that sometimes we, as writers, have to tart real life up. Real life is too ordinary. It’s too interior. It’s too boring. We have to heighten the drama, ramp up the stakes. Otherwise readers won’t care. But how, exactly, do we perform this wizardry? Do we just dream up wild stuff—sex, violence, zombies—and hurl it into the stew willy-nilly? How do we know what’s appropriate? How can we tell when we’ve gone too far? The answer brings me back to my favorite subject: theme. The principle is:   We may fictionalize but only…

Remember when Michael Jordan got into trouble for referring to his teammates on the Chicago Bulls as “my supporting cast?” He was, of course, only telling the truth. (Though Scotty Pippen, we must admit, has a right to be a little miffed.) But back to you and me and our novels based on our real lives. What about our spouses and kids and bosses and friends and the other crazy characters we’re going to write about? They may not like to think of themselves this way, but .. They are supporting characters in our story. Putting their egos aside, the…

  In the Comments to an earlier post in this series, “Using Your Real Life in Fiction,” Shawn wrote:   My question, which I think a lot of writers will have is this … Do you deliberately think of this stuff re: characters and their thematic roles, before you write your first draft? Or do you save this analytical/editor thinking for later? And then go back and tighten it all up?   Great question, pard. Lemme answer with a confession of exactly how dumb I am. A few years ago I wrote a novel called Killing Rommel. (No, it was…

(You guys, as of this post we’ll revert to the every-Wednesday mode for the remainder of the “Use Your Real Life in Fiction” series. I hope this recent barrage of Mon-Wed-Fri posts hasn’t clogged up too many friendly inboxes. I just got excited about this subject and couldn’t help myself.) We were talking in the previous post about killing off characters. We observed that this can be hard when the characters are based on people in our real lives. Can we kill off our best friend? Our neighborhood priest? Our mother? Answer Number One: We have to, if the drama demands…

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays on the next few Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) We were talking in the previous post about making the stakes of our real-life story life and death. Sometimes that’s hard to do. As writers working with our real lives as material, we can be naturally reluctant, say, to kill off a character we actually know. Our ex-husband? Our boss? Our mom? I’m sure you’re ahead of me on this. I’m about to say, “Kill ’em dead.” Whack ’em. Knock…

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays on the next few Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) Our Most Dreaded Outcome in crafting fiction based on our real lives is that the story will be too internal, too ordinary, too boring. Life is internal. Life is ordinary. Life is boring. And don’t forget our first axiom of the Lit Biz: Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*t. How can we make our real-life story dramatic, involving, and exciting? I’ll answer by quoting my old mentor Ernie Pintoff: “Have a body…

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays on the next few Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) Let’s talk about the inciting incident in The Knowledge. It’s an interesting question because how do you identify an inciting incident in your real life? Is there a true, real-world event? Do you make it up? And if you do, how do you know what to make up? The inciting incident in The Knowledge comes on page 29, the first page of “Book Two, The Turk.” Everything before that is…

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays on the next few Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) Two paragraphs on pages 140-141 are what The Knowledge was about for me. That was the payload. The other 273 pages are just the narrative architecture to carry what’s in those few lines. Remember our earlier series on this blog called “Why I Write?” My biggest reason, at least for my early (unpublished) books, was I was writing out of pain. Pain and guilt. Pain and remorse. I can’t prove…

(Tune in to Writing Wednesdays this Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the continuation of the series “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” — and for more of The Knowledge‘s backstory.) The problem with real life is it’s messy. It doesn’t fit into neat categories. But if you and I are going to use our real lives as material for fiction, we have to do just that. We have to wrangle it. We have to bring it under control. We have to pick a story category, i.e. a genre, and make our real-life narrative work within that genre. Or put another way, we…