Whether you are talking about short stories by Raymond Carver, novels by Barbara Kingsolver, or sudden fiction by Bruce Holland Rogers, you are reading stories that sprang from the imagination of the authors. Although the stories may in some way reflect events, characters and settings in the lives of the writers, the story elements are usually altered and in many instances, wholly invented. Fiction, a word that comes from the Latin verb “to form”, is this: a literary work based on the imagination and not necessarily on fact.

We all know that truth can be stranger than fiction at times. But well-written fiction can also sometimes have more impact than truth. The best fiction writers are “see-ers,” extrapolating events and characters from the world they experience, sometimes anticipating the future. Many fiction writers say that they write to answer questions that haunt their imaginations. “What will the world look like after we’ve run out of oil?” Or more contemporarily, “What happens when a man must protect the reputation of a friend when he knows it will cost him his own?” “What are the consequences of a town loving its high school football team more than anything else about itself?” “What is it like for a girl entering adolescence to be raised by her father after her mother has died?”

When we write personal essays and memoir about our experience, we evoke real events and circumstances to come to insight about our lives and those close to us. When an author takes on a fiction project, that author imagines his or her way into others’ lives, changing the circumstances and crafting storylines and outcomes in ways that are foreign to the nonfiction writer. Fiction writers have the freedom to change all of the elements to suit their storytelling needs. They can raise and explore questions that they didn’t live out in our lives.

By following invented characters as they confront and overcome obstacles, the fiction writer observes behavior and finds out what could have been true in “real” life. Where a writer may not have been admitted to law school and thus have earned the ability to sway a courtroom and the public in civil rights issues, inventing a character who is a lawyer and can do that helps deliver the thinking she yearns to contribute. If growing up abused limited the writer’s ability to be intimate with others, invented characters can learn how to do this. But as in all writing, even as writers know what they’d like to see happen, the characters’ lives and situations begin to dictate new events and thoughts. Many fiction writers report that by fictionalizing intense situations, they can cope in a way that the truth makes prohibitive. Whether the characters come to the endings the writers wish them to or their lives play out differently, practice with fiction writing exercises enhances all writers’ abilities to seek depth in their writing.

 One way of explaining the draw of writing fiction comes from Pulitzer Prize winning media critic Ron Powers. He says it is “a way of creating a mythic truth from your own personal mythos. And the contract with the reader is that the reader is sharing your myth, and that’s powerful because we are a storytelling species. We like stories.”

Novelist and teacher Carol Bly writes, “Making up stories increases one’s love of the universe generally: everyone knows that.” I’d add, of course, that telling a good story, made up or not, does the same work.

Practicing with fiction writing exercises, whether you start with something from your life or an entirely made up situation, will give you practice in “seeing” and looking for the ways in which action defines character, a skill you want to apply in nonfiction writing as well. What you learn about jumping right into a story will also useful in facilitating all your writing; whether you must keep a contract with the reader about telling the truth or are at liberty to invent a mythos the reader might share, avoiding unnecessary exposition and believing in your subject strengthens your effort.

This week, give fiction writing a try with the following three-part exercise, which we’ll build upon next week.

****

Finding a Story Idea
Story ideas come from what we are passionate about and from the experiences and emotional situations we must work through in life. In The Writer’s Idea Book, author Jack Heffron advises writers to write down the ten most momentous occasions in their lives. To help yourself think of those occasions, group them feeling categories: scariest, happiest, saddest. Perhaps as a young man, you were elected captain of your football team and you learned a great deal about being a man and a leader. Or perhaps as child you met your state senator and formed career goals of being in politics because of it. Pause now to make your own list.

After you have your list, go back and write questions that linger from those experiences. These questions might be, “How would your experience of being football captain have been altered if you’d been forced to accept a girl on your team?” “What happens when a person believes that being a politician is honorable, but he finds out that it entails lots of backroom dealings he doesn’t believe in?”

Creating a Narrative Line
Using one of your questions, it’s time to invent a narrative line for exploring it. I’m going to borrow from the work of screenwriting master teacher Syd Field for the next step in this exercise. Although he admits that most novelists and fiction writers work differently than screenwriters, because of Field’s highly influential publications, many fiction writers have begun to use his paradigms and methods. I think using his notion of story premise will help you.

In his book The Screenwriter’s Workbook, Field describes how he helps his students learn to create narrative lines by teaching them to come up with two- or three-sentence story descriptions of popular films. For the film Body Heat, for instance, he writes: “… a careless attorney meets and falls in love with a married woman, then kills her husband so they can be together. But he’s been set up for the murder and ends up in prison, while she ends up with a fortune in a tropical paradise.”

Field describes one student he worked with who was writing a screenplay concerning a woman who was to sign treatment consent for her acutely depressed mother. Doctors told her there were two choices for treatment — shock therapy or drug therapy and the daughter must decide what to do. The writer decided that in her story the woman’s daughter would wait and do nothing to see if her mother would respond in time. Field told his student that she had to decide if the story was about a mother recovering or it was about a daughter taking charge of the health and well being of her mother.

In the end, Field’s student couldn’t decide and ended up shelving her project. There’s a lesson here for us: we must go back to the questions from the occasions on our list. If this writer had witnessed a friend having to care for a mentally ill mother, she may have wondered about what it is like to have such responsibility for a parent. She might decide that not accepting either of the two medical treatments would provide her more of a platform for exploring this question than if she chose a medical treatment. The story might be stated like this: A woman’s mother is in the hospital needing treatment for mental illness, and all the options are onerous. Instead of listening to doctors, the woman takes her mother into her home with no treatment. In a delusional state, the mother burns the house down and the two take up residence at the mother’s childhood farm, where a farm hand falls in love with the daughter and with lessons from nature, helps her with the responsibility she has taken on.

Now that you have your momentous occasions and have written the questions you would like to explore, take a stab at inventing a Syd Field style synopsis. If your momentous occasion was being allowed, as a girl, to play on an all-boy team, your story might be: When a talented girl wins a place on the football team, the team captain succeeds in thwarting the team’s backlash but sustains his own injury in the process. The girl ends up succeeding in his place and the team makes it to the state championship game, which he watches from his hospital bed.

Author Nancy Lamb lets us know in her instructional book, The Art and Craft of Storytelling: A Comprehensive Guide to Classic Writing Techniques, a most assessable and comprehensive guide, how she turned one momentous occasion from her childhood into a story for a children’s novel. When she was in grade school, her friend Patty rode her little brother on the back of a bike. When the boy’s foot brushed against the wheel a spoke cut off his big toe. While he was rushed to the hospital, Patty searched for the toe. She packed it in cotton in a matchbox, according to Lamb, and it soon turned black and wrinkled. Patty stored the toe under her bed and took it out for her friends’ inspection whenever someone wanted to see it. Nancy’s fiction book, co-authored with Muff Singer, is The World’s Greatest Toe Show. In it, a little girl has saved her father’s toe in a matchbox and caused trouble as part of a club.

Figuring Out a Time Frame
Now that you have remembered a momentous occasion, formulated a question and shaped a narrative line, what’s next? Figuring out a time frame.

In sudden fiction (under a 1,000 words) or traditional short stories (over 1,000 words but under 9,000), the part of the story involved is, of course, smaller and probably occurs over less time than a novel takes on (although James Joyce’s Ulysses and the contemporary novel The House on Eccles Road by Judith Kitchen cover only one day in their several hundred pages).

To illustrate how you might make timeline decisions, let’s work with this story idea: Immigrant girl living in the US meets a boy originally from a country at war with her native country. She decides not to follow her family’s warnings and elopes with him.

If you are writing a novel, you could write the story from their meeting to their marriage and a future in which the family’s fears are or are not realized, perhaps concerning the children of the couple. In a short story, you might concentrate on the part of the story where the girl must take action and leaves home with the boy. In flash fiction, you might write only the thoughts the girl is having as they ride the bus out of town.

Once you have made your choice about the length of the story you are writing, rewrite your narrative line from where your protagonist is at the start of the story to the points at which things happen to her, and where she is at the end.

See what you can do with a few narrative lines. Next week, we’ll build on these using other tools of fiction writing.