From Non-fiction to Fiction

The Love Beggar: Non fiction

 It's not just a question of changing the first person into the third, or changing names of characters and of places. Turning your personal narrative into fiction, as I have discovered, involves a huge task: it means starting over. And the question that keeps battering at my door is: What is it/are you trying to say? What is it about? Easy to answer, perhaps, when the narrative is just your own story told in a creative way. But turned into fiction, it seems to me to demand a raison d'être all of its own, to beg a justification for being, a reason over and above the fact that it depicts a real life or part thereof, representing a "truthful" narration of events.

When it was non-fiction, I called my novel "The Love Beggar". This seemed to typify what it was about,  bringing all the disparate bits and pieces together under one thematic banner.  I was the narrator of the story, in which there were several love beggars, of whom I was one. Now that I have fictionalised it, however, this no longer seems appropriate. The story has changed, is changing more and more into something "other".  I am no longer the narrator. Who is? That is the first question that I now struggle with. Is it a middle-aged person like myself? Is it a friend of the family of which I write? Is it one of the country uncles? A city cousin or aunt? A school friend now middle-aged? One of the story-tellers of the time about which I write? I like this last possibility. Perhaps it is Uncle Bargy, the stutterer, or even Mrs Hooley, who lived on the river bank not far away from our place in South Grafton.

Now that I live in a city, have done so for many years, should I not be writing about urban issues? Why go back into the past, to a country setting, when there are lots of issues to write about in the city?

All I know is that I like to write and to create narrative structures that are seductive enough for others to want to read. Is that not reason enough to justify my art? I also know that I like the company of other writers, and that I enjoy reading their works and encouraging them almost as much as I like writing  myself. I see this as a win/win situation; even if I never get to be published, I am able to follow my passion and to improve at it.