By Sydney Alexander
In 2023, I attended the Baltimore CityLit Festival, excited to hear Carmen Maria Machado, one of my favorite authors, discuss her work. In addition to reading a new short story of hers that had been published in McSweeney’s Issue 68, she also answered many questions about her creative process, mentioning several things which I felt resonated with my own writing.
Carmen said that she often begins by writing in first person because it’s a point of view intimately familiar to her. When facing the unknown, she begins with what she does know. Thus, the first-person point of view serves as a jumping off point for her to explore more unique or fantastical ideas. What Carmen seemed to be getting at here, at least to me, is just one way in which her “truth” seeps into and informs her writing. While beginning to write, it can be daunting to think about the abundance and endlessness of possibilities. At the beginning of a story, there are so many directions, so many decisions that you can—and ultimately must—make. Thus, I think that her process may also serve as a form of advice: utilizing a personal truth can be a useful way to find direction in fiction, and this element of nonfiction does not have to be mutually exclusive with genre elements.
I think you can start with what you know, and then see how you can reconcile it with your own writerly interests in a story. You don’t have to be writing an autobiography to include elements of your own life, and kernels of truth aren’t inherently antithetical to fantasy or other forms of genre fiction. Especially when writing under a deadline, it is so much easier to write about things that have happened to you than it is to pull things out of thin air. At the festival, Carmen said coyly that she imbued a lot of truth or “real life” into her work, but readers who are not privy to the ins and outs of her life would never be able to discern what’s real from what she has made up. I truly believe in the idea that leaning into reality, and letting it soak into fiction, makes for better fiction.
I think about the way my own truth has surfaced in my writing. In “Homebody,” my newest short story publication, my nameless narrator wrestles with feelings quite real to me: shapelessness, formlessness, the feeling of being a little bit empty. As my narrator does, I conceived the idea while I was lying on the floor in my bedroom, paying attention to the same navy and gray rug that I described in my piece. At the time I wrote it, I was also taking architecture class. I did meet a girl with many tattoos who did tell me about a place in Burlington on Pearl Street, although it wasn’t in the architecture class, but instead an English one. However, to this day, I still have no tattoos, so it isn’t all real. In a way, “Homebody” is almost like an exaggeration or a hypothetical, taking elements of real life. Drawing upon details which had stuck with me over time, I spun a story together with more fantastical elements. In short, an implausible story grew from grains of truth. I like to think it is this truth which made the story feel more real or accessible to a reader.
While reading books, I find myself puzzling over small human details that surface in fiction, looking for details which may be elements of the writer’s truth. I wonder, what are the author’s interests in a piece of writing? Do they align with any facet of the author’s identity? I believe it’s no accident that many authors write about places they know intimately and well: these landscapes are part of their truths, the way they know the world. Over New Years, I visited close family friends in Wisconsin who were related to Mary Helen Stefaniak, a writer and author of both fiction and nonfiction. My friends told me, when they read Mary’s work, they love recognizing the elements of truth which Mary has drawn on, including real places or landscapes in Wisconsin that they have been to and are familiar with. This shared truth, I believe, is what makes writing come alive.
This perspective has even shaped the way I go about my own life. Daily, I find myself watching and cataloging actions, mannerisms, and habits of people around me. I look at what clothes they wear, where those clothes are from, and how they wear them. I look at the knickknacks a person keeps in their room or on their desk. I notice the length at which a friend keeps their hair, and the amount of grease which has accumulated at their roots. I look at the brand and condition of shoes they wear. I have even turned a critical eye to relationships or family dynamics that surround me. My perspective on what was game to write about changed after I began to consider the stories my family was telling me about my own family as potential material for fiction.
Once I told a professor my disinterest with typical literary fiction that I read in all the greatest and most prestigious literary magazines and journals out there: it’s all about boring unhappy people with their boring unhappy lives. I told him I prefer magical realism; I told him I prefer the stories where fantasy intervenes, not just stories about people, and he told me, well, at the end of the day, people are all we have. Thinking about my own real life and the way I can repurpose elements or stories from it in fiction has helped me figure out how to reconcile fact and fiction. I can write fantasy or magical realism without sacrificing the realism; I can write stories about “boring” people without doing away with the magical elements.
I realize now that I have been writing a lot more truthfully than I used to, given that I have become so conscious of all these daily minutiae, and how they make a story feel more real, more human, and more plausible. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are porous. Elements of nonfiction, I believe, are crucial for writing good literary fiction. If you want to write characters who feel real, who seem to exist outside of the container of the story, then I believe the easiest way to breathe life into them is to draw from real life itself.
Sydney Alexander is a junior at Middlebury College in Vermont studying English and geography. She grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland. Her work has been published online in Hunger Mountain Review and Mulberry Literary.
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