On Writing : Truth in Fiction by Tessa Shaffer

Take the inner wound from your personal life and assign it to your lead character.

Arc that out.

Bam.

Now any genre of script becomes your personal journey.

You only know the power of your insight when you give it creation.

This is a great great question.

As an actor, I've always been told that acting is "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances". To figure out what the heck that means, I know that I've had to get to know myself really well and become an expert & honest observer of other people. You have to be able to see yourself and the world around you for who we actually are, warts and all. And you have to be daring enough to implement that into your storytelling because the truth can be a lot of things: it can be beautiful, it can be hideous, it can be simple, and it can be really really painful sometimes.

I think it's been particularly important in my acting journey specifically (... ...I take that back, both my acting AND writing journeys) to remember that if someone makes a decision that you personally think is god awful, you have to realize that that person made that decision because they thought that it was RIGHT and then, you have to ask yourself why. Everyone is the hero in their own story, and everyone is the villain in someone else's.

This is a long way around saying that it's awfully gutsy to get truly honest in your storytelling, but that the very best artists (regardless of skill set, regardless of medium, regardless of genre) are making a point to do it every time.

David Santo love that approach, I've done it often!

Angela Cristantello wow, such a perfect example of seeing the truth in fiction through other mediums! I love it! Thanks so much for sharing!

Liz Gilbert mentions that when writing a memoir or anything based on reality, it becomes curated, and thus selectively truthful. Fiction, on the other hand, allows your truth to come out without you knowing it. This is why feedback early and often is so incredibly helpful - to show you what you're saying to the world before you are too late to change it.

Making the characters "real" people; that is, truth-filled, authentic persons. People who you'd actually meet, have a cuppa with, buy your groceries from, say hi to when walking your dogs.

Then you can put them in any story, any setting and the "fiction" of the story becomes truthful.

Ismael Judá Moraes Reis Dias I do the same, sometimes up to a year before actually starting a book, so great to hear I'm not the only one!

ahhh love that Karen "Kay" Ross

yes, John Ellis, I love reading characters and feeling like they are based on real people the author knows. =)

I like to try to approach the truth through the poor decisions my characters make.

@RichardBuzzell yes I struck on that note flagrantly on the page (maybe too much nostalgia for memories of my own poor decisions haha). This method seems to reveal plenty!

I must be doing something right wholeheartedly on the rollercoaster!

I definitely base characters in reality (on people I know or have observed), it helps me to differentiate voices.

I don't generally do world-building, so a good bit of truth in my stories comes from real locations and arena of story that feels organic and important to the characters and how they get there.

My characters talk in sometimes convoluted and tangential ways, which I think feels cinematic and accurate, they lie, get confused, joke around, quote movie lines, talk at cross purposes, seduce each other in ways both overt and subtle.

The real truth is that I am a passionately-devoted romantic, so even in the midst of crime drama, car chases, heists, sci-fi adventures and all sorts of shenanigans, each of my screenplays carries a strong and plausible yet slightly breathless subplot of romance.

And that always feels truthful to me as it reflects real life in which many people yearn rightfully for recognition and love, passion and frolics, many of the things that really make life worth living to the utmost.

And my dedication to story logic ensures that coherent timelines and sequences build a structural foundation for whatever elements I cause to stretch the limits of plausibility,

I care deeply about my readers and audience and find it important to win them over again and again, not to be cavalier about gaining suspension of disbelief but to favor my audience in many ways,

even as I employ dramatic irony judiciously and hand them the withheld details later on at the right time.

If it's on the page it's on the stage!

I call it blended reality. The characters are blends of real and fictional people as are the sub-plots blends of real and fictional events.

Yup lots of personal stuff in all my books but unless you know me really well, you definitely wouldn't have any idea... which is probably for the best ;-) But when you need raw emotion, you draw on your own experiences for writing and I guess it would be the same for actors? Otherwise it becomes formulaic and flat.

@Solange Plaza, yes! I think a good writer is also a professional people watcher always keeping an eye out for quirks and an ear out for dialogue! Differentiating voices is so important and real life is a great example to draw from, in fact--my 15-year-old niece wants to write her first multi-POV piece of fiction and I told her how important voices were and to try to base those characters on real-life people =D Thank you so much for adding to the convo!

Great quote, Tessa :) IMO, the trick is to offer characters and situations to which the audience can relate and hopefully empathize in order to deliver a truth. While trying to create those people and that world, we must avoid monolithic characterizations to avoid losing audience buy in.

@Daniel well said and I can appreciate your dedication to your craft!

@Jeff E. Gregory "blended reality" is a good way to put it!

@Daisy White Absolutely! Love that you add in personal stuff to your books and only those who know will know ;)

Tessa Shaffer thanks very much for kicking off such a wealth of commentary with this post!