Story and the Past: When the Fictional Story is True
February 12, 2010
Here’s the awkward truth–awkward, as so much truth is: I was nervous about the five little words my editor suggested adding to the marketing description of my first novel. Her voice was all enthusiasm over the line–but then she gets jazzed by everything, everything, I tell you, from character development to comma placement, which is why writers adore her.
“What if we added,” she wanted to know, “the words ‘Inspired By a True Story’–what do you think? Because that’s true, right? And people would love to know the story behind the story. Right?”
Well, yes. Sure. Exactly. Sort of.
Because certainly Blue Hole would never have been written without the Appalachian Mountains.
Or the brutal 1980 shootings on 9th Street in Chattanooga, or a cross-burning at the home of a Sri Lankan family in my hometown, Signal Mountain, Tennessee, or my friendship with the daughter of that family.
It wouldn’t have been written if I hadn’t loved my little Southern town, and boasted to the friends around me as an adult in Boston that my mountain was home to some of the kindest people ever to draw breath.
And it never would have been written if I hadn’t also been knocked-flat horrified as an adult living in Boston to learn that my hometown had also been beloved by the assassin Byron DeLaBeckwith. After he’d been acquitted by an all-white jury twice in Mississippi for the murder of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, Ku Klux Klan member DeLaBeckwith apparently found our pretty mountaintop a safe, comfortable haven during the years I was growing up there. So all that was true.
But regarding this truth thing, I’d had fear struck into me when my brother–who is, okay, yes, at least a rough model for the protagonist’s brother Emerson–read an early draft of the novel and proudly pronounced, “Yep, I can pick out the real person behind every character.”
“What? No, see, this is fiction,” I was desperate to explain–like he might’ve gone muzzy on the definition of fiction.
True, all fiction writers draw on real life, of course. We borrow a dimple here, a balding head there, our own ugly experience of betrayal and forgiveness and deceit.
But the last thing I wanted was old friends of my brother’s and mine drawing lines from each character to an actual person–suggesting sometimes a not very flattering portrait that was never intended as a portrait at all. The characters in the novel came, perhaps, from what Jung calls the “collective unconscious,” a mish-mash of conglomeration and imagination. But in the end the characters were fictional creations, and while the story was based on historical events, it, too, was fictionalized. It wasn’t a strictly accurate rendering of events–and wasn’t supposed to be.
Still, the key words “Inspired By” convinced us all the tag was fair to use with the book.
Now here’s what’s been so intriguing to me about a fictional story rooted in Truth–that is, the truth that human beings are horrifically prone to finding others to despise in order to feel themselves superior. And that the stories of these hates are all around us, some covered up, some blazing away in full view. And that human beings also have access to improbable grace. To forgiveness. To change.
Since Blue Hole Back Home was published nearly two years ago, I regularly hear from people who’ve read the book, then give me the gift of their own stories. Sometimes these are people who grew up thousands of miles from where I did, but something in the novel triggers tales of similar hate–and reconciliation–they’ve seen and lived out. Sometimes it’s people from my own hometown telling what they remember of events that few of us talked about at the time.
One story-giver was a cameraman who’d been sent to interview me, a guy about my own age who’d grown up near where I had, but raised in a whole different part of town. Now both in our forties, one of us black and one of us white, we spun out stories together, his filling holes in what I’d known or seen or remembered–his having personally known, for example, the five African-American women described in my story as being critically injured by drunken white guys–two of them let off entirely by the jury, the third serving only a handful of months. He was the one who finished that thread of the truth for me: all five women died without one penny’s compensation.
Just this week, I received a letter from a man in a maximum security prison who grew up in a valley not far from my mountain. He’d just read Blue Hole, and wrote to tell me how he remembered much of what I described in the novel, and how his father had taken him as a boy to a Klan rally at a nearby elementary school (an elementary school! Dear God). And how he was heartbroken now by the cruelty and senseless of the racism that brewed in those days, long after the height of the Civil Rights era. His words, written from prison by a white man who committed I have no idea what kind of serious crime, spoke of gladhearted change. In our culture. In himself. A story in trade for a story.
So I’m thankful today for stories. For the way they get us offering up our own little peepholes on Life and on Meaning: our stories –some of which we rightly call fiction. But when they speak from the gut and the heart, they can also be terribly, painfully, startlingly True.
If you want to hear more of the actual events that inspired–note that key word INSPIRED–the novel Blue Hole Back Home, check out this television interview with Channel 12 in Chattanooga.
Or view the YouTube video below:
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Connect with Joy
The truth you speak of above is the very reason writers of “fiction”, “fiction based on facts or actual occurances”, or “personal accounts” are important to our culture. Historians, like news reporters, usually try very hard to get accurate, specific, measurable and concrete details down for us; however, it is often through fiction and/or through the stories of individuals who were there that we begin to better grasp the whole truth of the matter. I don’t believe any one report can fully relate or recreate the entirety of an event, though a chronicler may do his best. Sharing multiple stories, especially those that get to the heart of things, allows us to see many perspectives. Somewhere in the midst of those tales, a purer truth unfolds. And sometimes, when voices are not found to tell the tales, truth can be lost or quashed down as if the thing never happened at all. I am grateful you found your voice and the courage to tell the story of Blue Hole Back Home. Thank you, Joy!
Hi there!
Great point about old friends drawing lines of a character to someone who might have inspired the character… or loosely inspired the character. The room to elaborate and embellish is too much fun!
I like the YouTube video – that’s really cool. The site is great as well, and I’ve always agreed with that statement concerning fiction; “fiction based on facts or personal accounts.” We write what we know, and the reason that we talk about our characters like they are real people is because they are real people. My character Landon is myself, he is my dad, he is who I was told not to be, and he is who I want to be. Creating a character in fiction takes the mixing and matching of people in the world. Love it.
Bringing out the truth has been one of my motivations for writing stories and poems. I adore the fact that I have the ability to pen down my experiences and thought. Deep down i’m afraid that people close to me will identify themselves in my book. But the encouragement I get from everyone outside my circle makes me want to reveal all experiences. The ability for readers to connect to our thoughts is amazing. I love the feedback part of writing.
I’ve often wondered if the fictional story isn’t able to get closer to Truth than the factual story. I’m reminded of a short story by Martin Luis Guzman titled “Festival of the Bullets.” In considering the Mexican Revolution, he wonders which stories of the war were more true: “those supposed to be strictly historical or those rated as legendary; those related exactly as they had been seen, or those in which a touch of poetic fancy brought out their essence more clearly. The latter always seemed to me truer, more worthy of being considered history.”