Writing from Within

In fiction writing, there’s nothing more important than creating an honest story. An honest story isn’t merely something that truly happened, and it doesn’t refer to non-fiction. An honest story is told by an author who was there, who experienced the narrative in real life, and is writing with the authenticity that can only come from personal experience. Fiction writers are often tempted to use the medium to concoct an elaborate story, or to explore the boundaries of some event that happened to someone else. But the best fiction writing is a product of writing from within, not writing from without. Great narrative movement is not in recounting an epic tale full of conflict and resolution. It’s in the vibrant details of a scene and the specific movements of a character. These elements, added together, create the great tapestry of fiction that puts the reader in the story.

The great stories of American fiction were all told by writers who genuinely experienced them. Readers of The Sun Also Rises are left with no doubt that Hemingway witnessed violent bullfighting, just as readers of Fitzgerald can be sure that he was well-versed on the culture of the swanky Hamptons in the 1920s. The great novels of the last hundred years – and thousands of more modest ones – are tales of personal experience. They’re populated by places an author has been, or people an author has known. At its essence, fiction is as real as any other genre. A great writer crafts a scene and a lens, and puts the reader in the picture. It’s easier to do this when he has already been there.

For a graduate English class many years ago, I was required to read a well-known book called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. The “nonfiction novel” follows Wolfe himself as he becomes immersed in the psychedelic, late-‘60s culture of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. At some point, each character experiments with LSD, a gamble at best given the unknown risks of the drug at the time. After completing the book, the professor of the class asked each student the pivotal question of the novel – did Wolfe really take acid (as he claims to have done)? The question gets at the heart of Wolfe’s credibility, and the reader’s faith in the claims of the book.

It’s the quintessential question of fiction writing, and one thousands of M.F.A. students around the country have encountered. Do you believe the writer? Consciously or not, readers of fiction ask themselves this question each time they read a writer’s work. It’s more than a B.S.-meter; it’s a measure of the author’s ability to write from within. A writer who’s been there can craft a great story with vivid details, and the reader will know it’s written from within.

So, did Wolfe take acid? I didn’t believe so at the time, but most students in the class did. Why would he take acid, I thought? Just for a story? Seems pretty dangerous, just for the sake of being authentic. I realize many years later that the answer was yes. Wolfe would have taken acid for the benefit of the story – to be sure that he was writing from within.