Writing tips
Mixing Reality with Fiction
12 January 2010 by Michele Roberts
Autobiography and imagination are intimately connected: our fears and desires may pour invisibly into the creation of a character. Nobody but the author need know how it’s done.
What seems to matter is writing about what I don’t know; what hasn’t yet happened. I may long for it to happen or dread it happening, but those potent emotions are the key. Both desire and dread, once written about, transformed by being put into the mouths of previously unknown narrators, bring paradoxical pleasure.
So in fiction I can exploit my shadow side, let myself be promiscuously perverse, be a mystic or a nun, and get away with murder. All those selves come out of my unconscious, which is to say my imagination, and they are raring to go.
Mixing Reality with Fiction
12 January 2010 by Michele Roberts
Autobiography and imagination are intimately connected: our fears and desires may pour invisibly into the creation of a character. Nobody but the author need know how it’s done.
What seems to matter is writing about what I don’t know; what hasn’t yet happened. I may long for it to happen or dread it happening, but those potent emotions are the key. Both desire and dread, once written about, transformed by being put into the mouths of previously unknown narrators, bring paradoxical pleasure.
So in fiction I can exploit my shadow side, let myself be promiscuously perverse, be a mystic or a nun, and get away with murder. All those selves come out of my unconscious, which is to say my imagination, and they are raring to go.
