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Fact into Fiction

RLF Fellow Bethan Roberts on a visit to Elvis Presley's Graceland

So there you are, thinking: I’d like to write a novel. And there’s your beautiful notebook, and it’s empty. And your Word document has no words in it. And everyone on your creative writing course has told you that it’s not enough to write what you know. And, besides, you probably feel a bit uneasy about taking events from your own life and turning them into fiction. What would your mum or your boyfriend say?

What do you do? Well, the obvious answer is: use your imagination. Make something up. But what does this mean, and how can we spark that process into life? As children we’re encouraged to use our imaginations, and people often talk about writers having great imaginative powers. There’s an idea that imagination is something very free, rather wild and abandoned, that it exists somehow outside of real life and is quite apart from anything ordinary, and that writers have a sort of magic channel of imagination that they can turn on and off (I’m thinking, for some reason, of the classic 70s TV series Jamie and His Magic Torch, where the hero jumped down a hole beneath his bed and into a world of adventures. I’ve often wished I had such a hole beneath my desk).

I used to worry that I didn’t have enough imagination to be a writer, that it wasn’t easy enough for me to jump down that hole. But I’ve thought about it a bit over the years and this is what I think imagination is. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not about having the ability to conjure a story out of thin air, although – hopefully – that’s how it will appear to your readers. It’s about sensitivity to the world around you. It is about being able – focused, disciplined enough – to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. It’s about being interested in a teacup, how it was made, what its shape and smell is, who held it last and what they were longing for as they drank their lukewarm Earl Grey tea.

In other words, imagination comes from the solid world around us. So I think a really good idea, if you want to write fiction, is to find out as much as possible about things that you are passionate about. This process is what some people call research.

I wish there was another term, actually, one that was specific to writers. Research feels too academic, and Hilary Mantel – twice Booker winner, writing genius, the gold-standard among historical novelists – doesn’t like us mere mortals to use it. In her Reith Lectures for the BBC, she said: ‘Writers shouldn’t claim they are doing research when they mean they are skimming facts out of pre-existing texts’.

Well, maybe not. It does sound rather hi-falutin.

Whatever we want to call it, I find that research – or finding out, or investigation – is a good way for me to build up to writing something. It’s a period which allows me time to read, daydream, create characters, events, locations. In other words, research is my imaginative hole-under-the-bed. And, for me, this hole has often led to writing about the real lives of people in the public eye.

There’s a long and rich tradition of turning this kind of fact into fiction, stretching from Shakespeare’s history plays to Walter Scott’s romances to the many ‘based upon a true story’ novels of today — Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, about Marilyn Monroe, and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, about Virginia Woolf, being two of my favourites. In these works, the writer inhabits the ‘gaps’ in the known stories of real people, imagining what it might have been like to be them in all sorts of ordinary-extraordinary situations.

Despite these models, it took me four novels before I dared to use the real name of the actual person I’d researched. Before that, my nerve failed me. In my second novel, The Good Plain Cook, I researched the life of Peggy Guggenheim, the eccentric millionaire art collector, and decided to write about the period of her life spent in West Sussex. Fairly late on, I realised that I’d made quite a bit up — not merely imagined how those real people had felt and dreamed up scenes that were lost to history, but remodelled things and made additions that I hadn’t researched at all. So I changed the names, and Peggy Guggenheim became Ellen Steinberg.

Having learned from this experience, I took the story of E. M. Forster and his policeman lover, Bob Buckingham, as the springboard for my next novel, My Policeman, but I deliberately changed the names, dates, location and a lot of the details from the start. I gave myself permission to make it up, but the story of Forster and Bob remained keystone of the novel.

So I guess you could say that I’ve tried a bit of everything. But for my novel Graceland I was determined to stick to the truth. I wanted to honour Elvis Presley and his mother, Gladys, by telling their real story. But what does this mean?

The first problem is whose truth? When you’re researching a novel, you need to keep an historian’s eye peeled for bias, and to ask why this person is telling you this story. There will be distortions, exaggerations and silences. And these are often the most interesting parts; the place where the facts are contentious can be ripe for drama.

There were many distortions, exaggerations and silences that were like little red flags to me in the Elvis story. They showed me where to zoom in. For example, it’s not much mentioned in the official Graceland-endorsed hagiographies of the King that his mother – famed for being a martyrish, if overbearing, Mama – was an alcoholic, and died of an alcohol-related illness.

This kind of vague half-truth is like catnip to a novelist. There’s an undeniable thrill involved in crossing a boundary. You just can’t resist going where they don’t want you to go.

You can’t write the real, infallible, 100%-certain story, because it does not exist. What you can do is write your own truth. And, as long as you’ve done as much work with the available evidence as you can, I think that has to be enough.

A novelist’s truth will be different to a historian’s, of course. Why do we read novels? We read them to understand the secrets of other people’s lives, to experience what it’s like to be someone else, to walk around in their bodies, see through their eyes, touch the people they love or hate, smell the things they cook, hear the songs they sang.

So even if you are writing a novel based on a real life, you’ll have to make things up. This is what novelists must do. A novel delves into its character’s interior lives, and it does it through the senses: this is where history can’t take us. Most of history, even recent history, is lost, because there’s no record of any being’s every living second and even if there was, no one but that being would be able to say what was going on in their mind — and even they probably wouldn’t be certain about that. So even in the most well-trodden stories there are silences, gaps, omissions, and this is where the novelist can jump in and say: I know! I know because I dreamed it! This is what Joyce Carol Oates is doing when she writes of Monroe’s casting couch experiences; it’s what Michael Cunningham does when he describes Woolf’s prickly relationship with her cook.

One of the great pleasures of writing this kind of novel is the opportunity it gives you to surprise your reader by subverting received notions of the past, or the famous, or the infamous.

Of course, the contemporary novelist writing about the past is caught in an impossible bind: you cannot escape your own time, you write out of it, and your writing will carry with it the weight of its assumptions about how people are. And having your characters fulfil your 21st-century wishes, by making them think things they couldn’t (because those ideas just weren’t common currency when they lived), can be very tempting.

For example, when I was writing about Elvis’s mother, Gladys, I didn’t want to portray her as the saintly stay-at-home-sacrificial-mother-cow so often depicted in lazy accounts of the Presleys. But I couldn’t pretend that Gladys would have had any truck with feminist ideas. She was, like all women of her era and place, constricted by the ideal of white Southern womanhood — expected to be pleasant, polite, essentially sexless, kind, quiet, god-fearing, maternal and submissive to men. But I did read that Gladys was famous in her neighbourhood for her buck dancing, even though it was frowned upon by her church. And that she threw the pointed end of a ploughshare at a farm owner who tried to whip her sharecropper daddy. So I was careful to include these details, in order to suggest the ways in which she rebelled and subverted that image. As long as you’ve dug deeply enough for them, the facts are your friends.

Of course, working with the facts (as far we know them) is a pain in the arse. Because real life is sprawling and often pretty shapeless. Characters are never where you want them to be, when you want them to be there. So why bother? Why not just change the names and make it up when the going gets tough?

Let’s ask the goddess. Hilary Mantel says, “The reason you must stick by the truth is that it is better, stranger, stronger than anything you can make up […] You can select […], highlight, omit. Just don’t cheat.”

I like that. Select, highlight, omit. Selection is important: just because something is true, doesn’t mean it’s interesting. And the events in a novel, the characters and their stories, have to be fascinating to you. If they’re not, they certainly won’t be to anyone else. You have to decide what it is that you most want to say about this story, and which scenes say it best. I decided, early on, that the story of Elvis was, for me, the story of a boy and his mother (probably because I have a young son). So my book highlights those aspects and necessarily omits some others. If it didn’t, it would go on and on and on, just like real life, and it would, in fact, be completely unreadable.

Let’s not pretend, though. With all this richness comes responsibility.

For a while I tried to avoid writing from Elvis’s point of view. Who was I to step into a superstar’s shoes? I had to work up the nerve to tackle such a massive subject, such a known story. Taking on Elvis is a challenge, and, from the start, I was well aware that although, like every Elvis admirer, I considered him to be mine, as a British woman who was only four years old when he died I was entering alien and hotly contested territory. Perhaps because of this, when I first took a stab at writing the novel it had a different frame: a present-day story of a young woman taking a tour of the Elvis sights, searching for her own mother. The responsibility of telling Elvis’s story alone seemed just too great.

Similarly, with My Policeman I was very aware, during the writing of the novel, of the responsibilities involved in portraying this situation. The novel tells a political, as well as a personal, story, and in it I inhabited the voice of an oppressed minority — a gay man in 1950s Britain called Patrick Hazlewood. At first the pressure of the responsibilities involved made me reluctant to write in Patrick’s voice, to make any claim to knowing what life was like for this man.

While I believe in the writer’s right – indeed obligation – to imagine other lives, however far they may be from their own, it is tricky, because it steers close to the dangers of colonisation, of exploiting stories or voices that have been historically repressed by the likes of you. Since I wrote the novel, this debate has moved on, and the importance of the publishing industry seeking out and backing ‘own voices’ from marginalised communities has rightly come to the fore. To my mind, it’s not that any writer shouldn’t write outside their own experience. It’s that all experiences should be written about, and the more diverse the places these stories are coming from, the better.

In the end, though, I took a risk. I couldn’t resist the challenge of writing Patrick’s voice and inhabiting his persona, just as I couldn’t resist Elvis. And I hope that I at least partly earned the right to write those stories through careful and thorough research. After all, one of the great pleasures of reading and writing fiction is inhabiting worlds that are far from our own. If we can’t do that, how boring would novels ­– and life – be?

Image shows Bethan Roberts on an investigative visit to Elvis Presley’s Graceland. Supplied by the author.


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