When you read a certain book is ‘based on a true story’, what’s the first thing that goes in your mind? For me, a ‘faction’ — blending fact with fiction — never fails to bring in more drama. And although I am aware that a book may portray real events and real people, it should not be referenced for historical facts.
Blending facts with fiction isn’t all that uncommon. Still, it always seems to create more questions, sometimes even scandal, the root of which is unfounded and full of ambiguity.
Kate Pullinger, author of two books that are loosely based on real events and people, believes that her top thing to remember when writing fiction based on a true story is: No matter what you write, some people will not be happy. Speaking at a vlog for the Eden Mills Writers Festival YouTube page in August, she said that her recent work Forest Green hasn’t come out yet, “So I don’t yet know whether or not some people will not be happy with it. It’s largely based on the 20th century and it mostly concerns people now are no longer with us. So who knows what’ll happen with that book!”
Her other book The Mistress of Nothing is also based on a true story. The person she based one of the characters from, Lucie Duff Gordon, has ancestors who are living today in the UK, one of whom is an eminent historian, Antony Beevor, who had written books on history about the Second World War. “And indeed, when the novel came out, Antony was not happy with the way I depicted his descendant. He wrote an article about it in The Guardian. Luckily for me, although he did not like the depiction of Lucie Duff Gordon, he was gracious enough to not focus his disapproval on me and my novel. The piece that he wrote, really, was about why he doesn’t like historical fiction. That’s a whole other kind of debate,” she recounted, glad that it wasn’t really a personal attack on her.
Let’s face it, if you’re writing about an real person who is well-known, readers will always compare your depiction of that person as a character with how he/she is in real life. Some of these readers will not hesitate to let you know — especially in these modern times when even celebrities and famous people are so accessible to the public through social media and the internet.
In the same vlog, Kate went on to give away four more tips one should keep in mind:
Just because it happened that way, doesn’t mean it will work in the novel. Kate’s first novel is loosely based on the life of her mother’s brother. She claimed that there are many things in it that didn’t happen in real life but there are equally some very dramatic things that happened in real life that don’t happen in the novel. She explained further, “I had to make those tough decisions to change the story in order for the novel to work as a work of fiction. The novel, really, moved quite far way from my original starting point with it. I mean, I knew I wanted to write about this uncle of mine who disappeared for the last 15 years of his life. I wanted to write about siblings and how two people’s lives can diverge so completely, how one family member can have a kind of ordinary, happy, long marriage and family life and another sibling can have a kind of disastrous life — a life where nothing really goes right for them. And that was the kind of tension that I was interested in exploring.”
Family members may not make good characters. Kate found herself struggling to make her mother work as a character on the page of the same novel. “I originally had thought that the novel would be parallel stories of two lives, one of which was going to be based on the life of my mother. But I could not make her come to life on the page and the character Peg is loosely based on my mother — very loosely and I just kind of pulled away from trying to depict my mother on the page,” she said, also thinking that it partly has to do with the fact that her mother had a happy life. “As all writers know, writing about happy people much less interesting than writing about unhappy people. That kind of had an impact on the outcome of the novel,” she added.
It can take a long time to get it right. The Mistress of Nothing took Kate 12 years to write. She had to get away from it several times just to have some space and write other novels. In particular, it took her so long to figure out how to tell the story and how to find Sally’s voice. Her other novel has taken her about 6 years to finish. Expect that you can encounter some setbacks during research and as what happened to Kate, writer’s block can set in. Having to perform another role while into writing your piece — for example, a full-time job, motherhood, or family illness — can also cause delays. For Kate, “This is the first time I try to write a book while also having a full-time academic role. I always had part-time jobs or freelance jobs in the past but now I’ve got a full-time academic role. Things got in the way.”
Lastly, fiction based on true stories requires as much imagination as in any other kind of writing. “You have to get into the minds of your characters whether they’re based on real people or not. You have to be able to find your way into your character’s psychology, understand who they are and why they do what they’re doing,” Kate said.