True Fiction

During my childhood, when I started writing stories, my parents constantly reminded me I had not had enough life-experience to come up with good fiction. A minor part of me thought they were right about it and wondered if I ever can make my dream come true. However, the bigger part of me knew they were wrong about it.

I filled the lack of experience with fantasy and knowledge.

During the first few years, I wrote stories for kids. After I started reading Stephen King and Jason Dark, my creational focus turned towards the horror genre, especially in the subgenre called splatterpunk became my creative home. And one thing we all can agree on, you cannot have life-experience in that genre.

When my teenage years ended, I lost my interest in writing horror stories filled with monsters and demons. During those few years I’ve learned a lot about the background of the most common unhuman beings, knowing that this could be the basis for some unique stories. I tried to write real horror stories. At least that was the master-plan to become the most bestselling author of all times. But destiny had different plans for me. Instead of writing real horror stories, I stopped writing at all, thanks to a Writer’s Block.

The stories I started writing focused more on the psychological aspect of human beings. I hated it, so I became my enemy and increased the Writer’s Block. Since no story got finished, no sentence ever seemed to be good enough to keep, I totally lost my interest in writing.

But with this dream murdered, I needed to find a job for myself. And as strange as it still seems to me, I started studying journalism. And with it, the Writer’s Block got loosen and vanished within a year. Being a journalist in Mauritius gave me a huge insight into daily life struggles all over the world, and that began forming the stories I wrote.

Something else filled the stories, I used my very own experiences. Small by small, I started creating what I call true fiction about my past. I used true events, real people and put all together in a story and added some fiction to it. A good examples is…

…”The Troublemaker”, because almost everything actually happened to me. Just the dialogues and some minor scenes are pure fiction.

The best example I can give, is a short story called “Last Moments” because there are three different stories inside, just one happened to a friend of mine. Everything else is fiction, but based around places I used to visit a lot. Since I don’t want to spoiler you, it makes it complicated to differ the truth from the fiction now. The event that took place at the station is true. The event that took place at the Ramblas in Barcelona is true. And of course I was a huge fan of MacGyver.

All those elements created that story.

While writing, I never care about anything apart from bringing the words onto the screen. After finishing the first draft, I find myself asking a lot of questions about it, especially how much truth a story requires to be deemed good. And my answer goes like, at least 2/3 of the story should be based on real-life events, and at least 1/3 of the fictional third should be based on authentic emotions.

When you write well enough, the reader will never find out what part is real and what is fiction. At least a few times, I did well enough to make the reader believe the fiction as real and the reality as fiction. To be honest, this is one thing I absolutely love about writing true fiction: the opinion of my readers about what is true and what is not and the reason for their opinion.

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The plan I had in my head to write about "True Fiction" was slightly different to this outcome. Somehow, this kind of journalist work is not yet working as I wish it would. But...

Thank you for reading!