Making stuff up
09/16/2009

Although I’ve been a writer for all of my professional life—aside from waitressing—I’d never written fiction until Family of Strangers.  As you might suppose, writing fiction is different from writing articles, press releases, newsletters, or grants.  With nonfiction, you try to tell people who, what, when, where, and preferably why, in the first paragraph.  With fiction, you try not to tell your readers much of anything.  Instead, you let your characters show readers what you want them to know.  You try to evoke the emotional response you’re after.  Most shocking of all, with fiction, you make stuff up. 

Making stuff up is both liberating and draining.  Liberating because it doesn’t matter whether you remember exactly what happened; draining because whatever happens, it all has to come from you.  You can’t just sit back and conjure up images from your memory files.  You have to create images for other people’s memory files.  That takes psychic energy.  Some people call it work.

Part of my motivation for writing Family of Strangers was to share with readers some of the strange and wondrous experiences I’d had in the Dominican Republic, or even here at home in the U.S. of A.  Yet it was often the reality-based experiences that my fellow writers criticized as unbelievable.  I quickly found that “But that’s the truth!” was no excuse. 

If part of the story wasn’t believable it was up to me, the novelist, to make it so.  Maybe I hadn’t revealed enough about a character’s motivations for the action to be credible.  Or maybe I needed to change the action to fit the character I *had* created.  Once I caught on, it was liberating to realize I didn’t have to limit myself to the facts.  So long as I wrote a story that readers find true and compelling, whether it actually happened or not is irrelevant.

One of the creative tasks I found most challenging was coming up with the stories Mami Luana tells her grandchildren.  In the novel, Mami Luana is a perennial storyteller.  As the real life Mami Luana is not, memory was no help to me.  Inventing magical realism stories for Mami Luana to tell was hard labor.

On the other hand, the real-life Jaime had many experiences that bordered on the magical, yet didn’t necessarily contribute to the story.  The time he took two ferries, a bus, and a taxi in the hope of locating me and my sons among hundreds of other snorkelers, swimmers, and sunbathers while we were anchored off the cliffs at Virgin Gorda is a true-life fairy tale that validates Jaime’s faith in destino.  But whether or not it moves the story forward enough to remain in the final manuscript remains to be seen.

Two of the main characters in Family of Strangers, Jessica and Julian, have no real-life role models.  They are purely fictional creations.  To write about them, I had to spend “walking around time” in each of their heads.  I couldn’t just sit down and have the details of their lives known to me; I had to live with them for awhile. 

Unfortunately, some of the details they shared didn’t dovetail with the real-life parameters of the story.  Jessica, for example, thought Jaime should be a casualty of Hurricane Katrina.  But Katrina took place at least four years too early to fit the novel’s timeline.  In cases like that, the journalist’s bias for facts won out.  Jessica’s fiction had to yield to reality.