Stranger than Fiction
No, I'm not referring to the
Chuck Palahniuk
collection of essays by the same title or the
Will Ferrell movie
. What I'm speaking of is the tendency of fiction writers to include "true" or "real" aspects of their life in their writing. In
Tijuana Dust
, this concern arose when I began fleshing out the main character of Martinez.
An integral kernel idea about the protagonist that guided some of his decision-making was his history as a drug runner for the Mexican mafia. Naturally this isn't an autobiographical element which I worked into the story; truth be told, I see more of myself in the Chuck Lord journalist character given my experience contributing to a San Diego weekly paper. However, I had met someone during college, a friend of a friend who was perpetually surfing couches in Santa Barbara, who said he couldn't get his own place because he had gotten mixed up with some unsavory folks in Tijuana. The implication being that people were looking for him and he didn't want to put down roots in any one place for long.
In reality, I didn't trust much of the guy's story, but I had to admit I could see its persuasive appeal to an ethos that a lot of college kids weren't likely to question. But this brings me back to the question of 'how much of reality/facts from life do you insert into fiction?' I ask this as something of an ethical question because fiction is the genre people will tell you to 'write what you know'; however, you don't want to put so much of your life or the truth of those around you so that you betray the trust of friends and family--in a lot of intro to creative writing classes, there are warnings against the thinly-veiled memoirs that are nearly impossible to workshop--inevitably the writer will respond with something to the effect of "even though someone said this plot element didn't make sense, it really happened that way."
And this leads back to this issue of stranger than fiction. What I think most people are criticizing when they point out these kinds of plot issues is that the story does not meet some expectation presented earlier in the story. I've heard different interpretations of red herrings, but I knew one writer who said, "If you put a gun in the living room on the first page, that's a red herring, meaning that gun is going to get shot by the end." Red herrings are often used to throw people off, but in the context of the writer's point, he was getting at the fact that fiction relies on a certain contract between writer and reader for a story to conform to some expectation or follow some agreed upon rules. So when someone says, "this part of the plot didn't ring true" what they're really saying is "this might very well be true, but it hasn't been crafted enough to meet the reality within the story."
A link to a previous post I wrote quoting Palahniuk's Stranger than Fiction based on my experience at a writer's conference with agent-writer pitch sessions.
http://cruzwriting.blogspot.com/2008/10/bookexpo-writers-conference-08.html
Q&A session at Chapman University
movies criticized consumer-culture, after all, where did the zombies go but to the mall? Staggering around in need of brains, they return to a location of mindless activity. Does the location of a Starbucks-like coffee shop pose a similar critique?
guy. Not to say I might have enjoyed reading him a bit more than some of the other fiction I've read in classes along the way. But some time back I saw the trailer for Inherent Vice
and like others I enjoyed the Big Lebowski
-like mise-en-scène. Providing a look and feel might go against the reader's ability to envision a story for themselves, but doing Pynchon's doing it. The look of this trailer also reminds me of the beginning of Californication
which always seems like it's relying upon a Bukowski
aesthetic/sensability. 
