Real Life?

Somewhere on the internet this week, my email pal, the author Donna Fletcher Crow (find her at her website Deeds of Darkness, Deeds OF Light) raised the question of real life as an inspiration for fiction.  It’s an interesting question, as it seems to be self-evident that real life has to be a powerful resource.  After all, if, on the cover of a book,  you read “Based on a true story”  then it’s a real selling  point.  But….

Agatha Christie, in her introduction to The Body In The Library wrote:  “Staying one summer for a few days at a fashionable hotel by the seaside I observed a family at one of the tables in the dining-room; an elderly man, a cripple, in a wheeled chair, and with him was a family party of a younger generation.  Fortunately they left the next day so that my imagination could get to work unhampered by any kind of knowledge.  When people ask “Do you put real people in your books?” the answer is that, for me, it is quite impossible to write about anyone I know, or have ever spoken to, or indeed have even heard about!  For some reason it kills them for me stone dead.”

And d’you know, I know exactly what she means.  When Agatha Christie, or anyone else for that matter – including me - is constructing a tightly plotted book, it can seem a mechanical exercise.  X bumps off Y and Z comes along and uncovers the dark deed.  Then, off course, you’ve got the Red Herrings – let’s call them A,B and C – to add pleasant confusion to the outcome.  Naturally, no one wants to read (or write!) about letters of the alphabet, so X and Y and all the others have to acquire personalities.   But they have to be a particular sort of personality.   That shy, mousey girl with an intense nature has to be capable of being so intense that, given the right motivation, she can be a credible murderer.  That jolly friend-to–the world, cheerful Uncle Charlie, has to show the odd flash of temper or meanness to make us accept that he, too, could embrace crime.  These personalities aren’t simply bolted on but spring from the plot.  What sort of person, to put it another way, would do this sort of thing? That way, with plot and characters working together, the book  becomes a unified whole.  And, because the book has to hang together, extraneous  bits have to be edited out.  If a character has a deep interest in chemistry, say, or mediaeval needlework, then that had better come into the plot somehow or the reader will feel a real let-down.  Now real people have all sorts of random interests and various quirks that makes them them.  Also – I hope! – the vast majority of the people we know well  aren’t actually capable of slipping arsenic in the tea or sawing through the axle of a car.   And that’s why raw real life isn’t much help to a dedicated detective-story plotter.  Real life is far too untidy and doesn’t stack up.  Fiction – an art – does.  That’s one of the reasons why it’s so enjoyable to read!