One
of the problems of using real-life experiences as a basis of fiction is the
difficulty of divorcing oneself from the events in the story to be able to
focus on a plot that will appeal to a broader audience. Oscar Wilde’s famous
quote that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” is the conundrum
facing most writers who attempt to create fiction based on real life events.
Just because “it really happened” doesn’t mean it’s good fiction.
Real
life is messy and complicated and doesn’t follow the rules of fiction. It’s also boring at times, even mundane. In
my attempt to turn three generations of real life into a work of fiction, I
find that knowing the “real” people and events has turned out to be both a blessing
and a hurdle. Sometimes real life can become too unbelievable for good
fiction. A smooth well-crafted story
must have characters that are more exciting, more interesting, and more
disturbing than real life to make them worthy of being read. To make the story
broad enough for readers to relate to I need to give my characters room to roam
and behave in different surroundings and situations. I must take the raw clay
of factual material and shape it into something that is my own creation.
To
expand the scope of my story and create a more substantial framework for the
plot, I must distance myself from the real characters and make them my own. I
must structure the formlessness, confusion, and indecision of everyday life
into the demands of a novel with believable characters and a dramatic plot. The
challenge is to lift the characters, events tragedies and triumphs from the
pages of real life and create a new existence for them.
By looking at the family through the lens of
several generations I hope to present it realistically as part of a larger
social predicament. The historical evidence reveals that families have always
been in flux and often in crisis, and that families have been most successful
wherever they have built meaningful networks beyond their own boundaries. Every
family, even though it is made up of individual members, results in a whole
that is greater than the sum of its parts.
According to Bowen’s theory of family systems, it is the nature of a family that its
members are intensely connected emotionally. Family members so profoundly
affect each other's thoughts, feelings, and actions that it often seems as if
people are living under the same "emotional skin." People solicit
each other's attention, approval, and support and react to each other's needs,
expectations, and distress. The connectedness and reactivity make the
functioning of family members interdependent. A change in one person's
functioning is predictably followed by reciprocal changes in the functioning of
others.
This
emotional interdependence presumably evolved to promote the cohesiveness and cooperation
families require to protect, shelter, and feed their members. Heightened tension,
however, can intensify the processes that promote unity and teamwork within the
family, and this can lead to problems. When family members get anxious, the
anxiety can escalate by spreading infectiously among them. As anxiety goes up,
the emotional connectedness of family members becomes more stressful than
comforting. Eventually, one or more members feel overwhelmed, isolated, or out
of control. The ones who accommodate the most to reduce the tension in others are
often most vulnerable to problems such as depression, alcoholism, affairs, or
physical illness.
Family dynamics are shaped by the social,
economic and political issues of the times as well as by the personalities
involved. Because humans are capable of
change, and family members take part in different experiences, the dynamics
within a family never remain the same. Therefore, I have chosen to focus on the
changing dynamics of the family from a multigenerational perspective as it
copes with the stress of transitions and role changes during times of massive economic
and social changes.
Sounds
ambitious! I just hope I’m up to treating it in an entertaining and
story-appropriate way!
