Why Writing Needs to be Real

It was the first time workshopping the new students on my courses yesterday. They're all new-ish to writing, and I think weren't quite sure of what was expected of them. But they had a go and turned in work and we workshopped. One comment was duplicated on several pieces: if it had been more real, it would have been funnier/scarier.

Writing needs to be rooted in reality. If it isn't real we can't project ourselves into the situation and it becomes distanced, rather like watching a television through a window. If the situation is real, however, we can put ourselves there. Then we can find it funny, or scary, or romantic.

So, if you take the characters on Friends, Monica is a control freak. She's more of a control freak than anyone I've ever come across, but it's an exaggeration of a tendency I see in others (not me, of course). I'm a fan of programmes like Time Team, and give me something about Ancient Rome and I'm there, but I can see that Ross takes his dinosaur enthusiasm too far, or rather, into the realms of comedy. Joey is dim, Rachel is vain, Chandler is Mr Beige, Phoebe is irritating - I mean fey. It's all normal human behaviour, but exaggerated.

Conversely, I didn't find Black Swan that scary - and I'm so easily frightened, I thought I was going to have a heart attack during Misery and had to leave the cinema. But it was about a world I knew little of, and the characters didn't seem grounded in any normality I recognised so it was harder for me to care about them.

John Irving said in an interview once that he writes the first draft full of normal people, then in the second draft he exaggerates them to make them funny. It's normality on superdrive. But it needs that kernel of truthfulness to work. Perhaps that's why I don't 'get' Phoebe - her character is the furthest away from my reality, and therefore she seems contrived rather than real.

Reality v Realistic

I loved Ian McEwan's novel Atonement - though I've had many a discussion about the ending. My mother, normally a McEwan fan, was sniffy. She'd been a nurse at a London teaching hospital during WWII, just like Briony in the book, and pronounced that it was unbelievable.

I was surprised. After all, McEwan had done extensive research at the Imperial War Museum and was even accused of plagiarism due to the similarities in Atonement to No Time for Romance, a novel by Lucilla Andrews who had been a nurse at St Thomas' Hospital during the war.

My mother was unrepentant. 'I can see he's done his research,' she said. 'And I'm sure each of those incidents did happen. But it's unbelievable that they'd all happen to one particular nurse.' In other words, real incidents, but an unrealistic situation.

That's one of the tricks of narrative writing. Real life, but exaggerated. (I'm using the term narrative writing because it's true of non-fiction just as much as fiction.) In real life, when drama comes, we try to go back to normal as soon as possible. In narrative writing, characters rush headlong from one crisis to another. In real life, we get home from work and settle down with a nice cup of tea for an evening's viewing in front of the TV. If a character starts their evening in the same way the author will either interrupt it with a crucial phone call or that's where the scene will end.

Real life, but without any of the boring bits. After all, we can do boring bits at home every day of our own lives. We don't want to read about them, whether in fiction or narrative non-fiction. So, McEwan was right to load Briony's life at the hospital with as much drama as he could find in the archives. It may not have been real, but it was realistic - and more to the point, it wasn't boring.