Getting to the Truth in Fiction

By Gina Carroll

Lois Daniel says it best, “All good writing is an excursion into honesty.”

I’ve written a lot about truth—how important but tricky telling our truth can be in memoir writing and in the telling of our own stories. In A Story that Matters, I acknowledge that truth in memoir can be a slippery concept because it is reliant on memory. 

Truth and memory are the cornerstones of storytelling, all storytelling, and that is what I find most interesting when it comes to fiction. I am new to fiction writing. I am still learning the ropes. But what has pulled me to trying my hand at writing fiction is this notion of truth in made up stories. 

In non-fiction, the call to be honest and adhere to the truth is important, but truth is unreliable. To be sure, the information you put out there will very likely be fact-checked and verified. Still, most readers come to memoir understanding a sort of unwritten disclaimer, which is, “this is my story as close to how I remember it as I can come.” But in fiction, readers are ruthless about the truth. And this is not the paradox it appears to be. Truth wears a different cloak in fiction, and no disclaimer will save the writer who is sloppy with it.

In made up stories the effort is not so much trying your darnedest to keep to what ACTUALLY happened. But the effort is still in trying to stick with what is true—in the world, in culture, in human interaction, emotion and deed. 

If I am writing about a garden, as I have been, I must contend with, stick to, expand and contract to, what is true about gardening. And, I’ve learned, there are so many rules, realities, dos and don’ts, musts and must nots about keeping things alive and fashioning something whose beauty and vitality will endure.

But even beyond the realities of the natural world and what it takes to wrangle with it, the truth that I want to get at is about what gardens mean to my characters, what it may symbolize in the story, all of the themes salient to what I am wanting to say and where I am trying to go. What is true in this context? Here, true means authentic, consistent and befitting my characters and the situations in which they find themselves.

Even if I am creating a garden that will exist in another place that is not of this world, as our favorite science fiction writers might, if it’s going to be a garden, even my departures from what we know about gardens must have some truth to them or else you won’t recognize my departure as a garden at all.

In “A Fire Upon the Deep” by Vernor Vinge, the planet Strata is harsh and unrelenting on the surface, but underground is a bioluminescent underground garden where the characters encounter a complex alien ecosystem. In “The Martian” by Andy Weir, the protagonist, Mark Watney, uses his ingenuity to create an “aerofarm” inside the Martian habitat, using hydroponics. These gardens are futuristic and not of the Earth, but we connect with what they are both physically and in terms of their symbolism as a beautiful system of intelligent caring in the case of Vinge’s story and of ingenuity and hope in Watney’s.

An early reader of my novel, The Grandest Garden, found my dialog difficult to believe because, they felt, I did not use enough contractions. Before I received that helpful piece of criticism, I fancied myself fairly good at dialog. But for this reader, the dialog between my characters did not ring true. And this departure from the truth was disheartening for them and kept them from snuggling up to the story the way they should nave been able to. 

So, the question, is my dialog true, is an important one. Working to make your dialog true to the way people talk, specifically, your characters, is important. In this case, there could have been a reason why my characters did not use contractions. But it doesn’t matter to my reader unless I have successfully let them in on that fact. If I’d done that successfully in the story, the infrequency of contractions would not likely have been off-putting to my reader.

So, in all, not only did my dialog need to be true to my characters, but my characters also needed to be true to the way they spoke to each other. Both of those things had to be missing for the reader to be annoyed.

I share this humbling example for two reasons—one, to just acknowledge that as a newcomer to fiction, I am still learning and trying to be great. But also, two, the commitment to be true to your story and even to the people that you have created is where the most important work is in fiction. And that’s the truth.

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THE GRANDEST GARDEN

Listed on Hasty Book LIst’s “Most Anticipated Contemporary Fiction of 2024”

Bella Fontaine is on her own. Fresh out of college and with the winnings from her first international photography competition, she decides to leave Los Angeles to forge a new life in New York City. But will she be able to overcome the trauma of her childhood and her break from home to make it as a successful artist and professional photographer in a new city? Or will her secrets catch up with her ,and keep her from developing the relationships she needs to make her dreams come true?

We meet young Bella just after her tenth birthday, and her grandmothers, Olivette and Miriam, each with a beautiful, mature garden as different from each other as the two gardeners who tend them. As Bella’s homelife begins to unravel, she relies on her grandmother’s gardens as her refuge for stability and belonging. But when Miriam moves in with Olivette in search of healing, the grandmothers bond in a way that makes Bella feel excluded. What happens next sends Bella out into the world before she is ready.

The Grandest Garden is a poignant coming-of-age story about the ties that bind us to our people and how to survive when they break.

BUY HERE

Gina Carroll began writing, blogging and speaking after leaving a large corporate law practice to raise her five children. Her first book, 24 Things You Can Do with Social Mediato Help Get into College, helped students show their best selves and tell their own stories online. Dedicated to the belief that everyone has a story worth the writing and the telling, she wrote A Story That Matters: A Gratifying Way to Write About Your Life, to help aspiring writers get their life stories written, polished and shared. She founded Story House, LLC (formerly InspiredWordsmith), a writing, editing, and authorship services company based on the belief that the storytelling universe needs more authentic and diverse voices. She is most proud of the debut Story House publishing effort, Stories Are Medicine: Writing to Heal, An Anthology, a beautiful offering from a committed and brave group of Black women writers from Houston and beyond.

Gina is a graduate of Stanford University and UCLA Law School, currently living in Houston, Texas. The Grandest Garden is her debut novel.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing