TURNING EXPERIENCE INTO FICTION.

TURNING EXPERIENCE INTO FICTION

Few days ago, I made some tweets;one particularly left me in awe after going through many questions that swum in like a tadpole. I tweeted, “We are surrounded by stories, find your and write them”. That was just it, IKR, small, meaningless tweet, but transparent with meaning. It seemed easier with the eye but the heart wouldn’t find it easy particularly to writers who are not familiar with the prose-fiction genre, its aesthetics and nuances.

A very good friend of mine and a budding writer, Oluchi had sent a DM stating, “I have so many happenings around me, but I don’t know how to pen them down.” Then I realized for almost all fiction writers, the problem wasn’t with writing — even if the first draft of their story — but turning all the chunk of [personal] experiences they have into fiction. Fiction they say is similar to reality through the tool of verisimilitude. Like realism, in resembling reality is where reality is birthed. It is the reality of reality. The former ‘reality’ is the writing-proper and commitment to the technicalities of the novel genre while the latter is the ‘experience(s)’ which serve as a body of knowledge and conduit for fictive experiments, improvisations and manifestations.

Turning reality into fiction poses a few choices to writers: [on truism] how true should it be? How much of my personal life should I incorporate? How do I build dialogue, develop plots and create those off-the-shelf characters which most times come like magic for the big writers? More so, you are often faced with many other incongruent decisions. Sometimes, you feel like leaving your characters to decide for themselves and walk into their own waterloo — if that is their reward — but there you are; you feel too pathetic, pathos consuming you like wildfire and allow your own decision to prevail. Well, rightly, the writer is the agency through which characterization and narration manifest.

You sure can turn your (true) personal experience into fiction by your decision. We all have that hunting past; tempting present and terrifying future we want to put into words, no matter how little like a flash-fiction. There are experiences with family, sexual priorities, job-hunt, family values, travel significances, lores, rituals, and rhetoric. In this metallic transformation of the cross sub-genre into the well-established genre, certain choices would have to be made on the altar of decisions — How do you negotiate the self and the other? How do you handle the dangling edge of ‘memory’ and ‘loss’? How do you integrate, expunge and melt ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ and vice versa? How do you draw from autobiographical sources? With all these materials, what part do you utilize or leave out? [Like Chimamanda had to decide while writing Half of a Yellow Sun]. How do you imagine popular culture, identity, gender mis-representations and performances etc.?These decisions must be made, and provided with an answer even as the writer journeys through the creative writing process. I’d say in most cases, you need to draw from personal experiences. Not all fiction really is fiction. It would be good to tell you that behind its lens are other shades of colours.

Every writer, one way or the other draw from personal experiences painted with the canvass and brush of imagination. Let me add that Colleen Grima may not have been able to write Bittersweet without having gone through the tragedy of her brother’s death. Similarly, most writers in the diaspora with their ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘return’ and ‘rootedness’nuances may not have been able to create many of the fine fiction you have read on trans-migration, diaspora and multiculturalism if not for their personal experiences of and with it. The list is endless — Diana Evans, Chimamanda NgoziAdichie, Teju Cole, BuchiEmecheta, OkeyNdibe, HelonHabila, Sarah LadipoManyikaand many others. I have also written some of my short stories largely from personal experiences.

It suffices to say that self-realization comes through reasoning and such reasoning is in exploring ones creative juice. Through self-realization and awareness, your next big story can be (re) created. The biggest stories come unexpectedly when your hands are hungry to type in just one more word. It becomes two, three, a hundred, thousand and hey presto, you have a full story length or a novel.

To this end, Melissa Broder, Author of The Pisces — one of the NY Times Best seller psychological fiction in May, 2018— wrote, “If everything on the surface stops making sense, all you need to do is to dive deeper”. So dive deeper, write that fiction now, even if it would cost you to go on a date with your personal experience.

About Author

Badiru Kehinde is a grammarian, poet, short story writer, graphics designer, and editor. He was born in Lagos, grew up in Okokomaiko, Lagos and Ibadan. His first published work of poetry is I Know Why Your Mother Cries. He is currently working on his Short-Story collection, A Page this Dark and Other Stories. Kehinde enjoys the Smooth Jazz music of Brooklyn-born “Snarky Puppy” and “The Pieces of a Dream”. He shares and believes in Jesus, Marxist laws and Karma. He designs his writings with illustrations and animations for many whose eyes have never been wooed by poetry. He currently lives in Lagos and shares exciting stuffs on his social media platforms.

Facebook | Twitter | Instagram @Badiru Kehinde