THE USE OF FACTS in fiction

All fiction is founded upon fact, for the boldest imagination must have

some definite point from which to take its flight; but the un garnished

truth is seldom literature in itself, though it may offer excellent

material for literary embellishment.

The one place where the average writer should not seek

his material is the world of literature. Almost from the time when

men first began to dabble in letters they have drawn on their

predecessors for their subject matter; but this practice has produced

a deal of unconscious plagiarism, which is responsible for most of

the conventional and stereotyped stories with which we are afflicted

to-day. Of anyone hundred average stories submitted for sale,

probably seventy-five are damned by their hopelessly hackneyed

conception and treatment; and they suffer because the writer, reading

some attractive story built upon a similar plot, has attempted to go

and do likewise, and has unconsciously used all the conventional

parts while omitting the essential individuality.

It is safe for the novice to go only to the world for literary material.

The matter so obtained will be intrinsically the same as that gained

from the writings of others, but the fact that you get your information

through your own senses will considerably obviate the danger of adopting

the conventional view in the matter. I do not mean to say that you

should deliberately set out to search for new types and incidents as

Dickens did, though I would certainly commend such a course; I mean

rather that you should be content to write of what you personally and

intimately know, and not attempt to treat of matters of which you have

only a vague superficial knowledge, or of which you are totally

ignorant. Excellent stories have been written by men who were personally

unacquainted with the matters with which they dealt, but they were in

every case masters of their art, who knew how to gain and use

second-hand information and how to supplement insufficient data with

literary skill.

It is rare indeed that a fact can be used without embellishment. Mere

facts are frequently most unliterary, though they may be susceptible

of a high literary polish. The sub-title "A True Story, " which young

writers think so valuable a part of the tale, is too often the

trademark of an unreadable mess of conventional people, ordinary

incidents and commonplace conversation. We find few genuinely true

stories, and when we do find them we seldom care to read them

through. I have read many stories which I knew to be literally true,

because they contained so much of the hackneyed and the irrelevant.

Life itself is a very conventional affair; it abounds with dull

events and stupid people; and for that reason alone fiction would

demand something out of the common. Commonplace persons and

commonplace things do appear in literature, but they must have

something more than their commonplaces to recommend them.

"The novice in story telling . . . has heard that truth is stranger than

fiction, and supposes that the more truth he can get into his tale the

stronger and more effective it will be. . . . Truth, i. e., reality, is

very seldom strange; it is usually tame and flat and commonplace; and

when it is strange it is apt to be grotesque and repulsive. Most of the

experiences of daily life afford material only for a chronicle of

dulness; and most of the 'strange' or unusual happenings had better be

left to the newspaper and the records of the police courts. This

statement may be strengthened. Does not the able reporter select and

decorate his facts, suppressing some, emphasizing others, arranging his

'story' with reference to picturesqueness and effect?

"In other words, verisimilitude, not verity, is wanted in fiction. The

observer notes his facts, and then the artist seizes on the ideas behind

them, the types they represent, the spiritual substances they embody.

The result, when all goes well, is as lifelike as life itself, though it

is not a copy of anything (in detail) that really lives. . . . The budding

writer of fictitious tales must be familiar with facts, at least in his

own range: he must know life and nature, or his work is naught. But when

he has this knowledge, he must put the facts in the background of his

mind. . . . Real incidents, dragged against their will into an (alleged)

imaginary narrative, are apt by no means to improve it, but to sound as

'flat and untunable' as our own praises from our own mouths. "

"There must be no misconception about great fiction being a transcript

of life. Mere transcription is not the work of an artist, else we should

have no need of painters, for photographers would do; no poems, for

academical essays would do; no great works of fiction, for we have our

usual sources of information--if information is all we want. All

these things certainly contain the facts of life which one must know for

the constructive work of the imagination, for they are the rough

material, the background of knowledge from which the illusion of real

life must proceed. But they are not life, though they are the

transcription of life. The human significance of facts is all that

concerns one. The inwardness of facts makes fiction; the history of

life, its emotions, its passions, its sins, reflections, values. These

you cannot photograph nor transcribe. Selection and rejection are two

profound essentials of every art, even of the art of fiction, though it

be so jauntily practiced by the amateur

In using facts, then, the first thing to learn is what to suppress and

what to elaborate, and that involves that most necessary possession of

the story teller, a sense of proportion. Because a conversation about

the weather occupies two dull people for ten minutes is no reason that

it should receive an equal number of pages; and because an important

event is almost instantaneous is no excuse for passing it with a single

line. Again, the fact that you are relating what actually occurred does

not relieve you of the necessity of making it plausible. Painters

acknowledge that there are color combinations in nature which they dare

not reproduce, lest they be dubbed unnatural; and similarly things exist

which the writer may present only after he has most carefully prepared

the way for their credence. The truth is that we have declared that even

nature shall conform to certain conventions, and we reject as impossible

any deviations from our preconceived ideas.