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Biographer, travel writer and poet Ingrid Horrocks has finally made it to fiction after 30 years of telling herself she would. Her fiction debut, All Her Lives: Nine Stories, was published earlier this month. She tells the Listener about her transition from nonfiction to “make believe”.
I’ve just squeaked in before my 50th birthday. Who knows why this took so long. For many of us, it just does.
Until now, I’ve written mainly from my own experiences. I’ve written a coming-of-age travel book, and intimate poetry about going through IVF. I’ve written a memoir that goes deep into my own mid-life and also reveals plenty about my siblings and parents and, to an extent, my children.
For a while now, I’ve worried about people thinking I enter their kitchen (and my own) with a mental notebook. I believe in writing from life, and all that nonfiction can offer, but navigating its ethics and anxieties can be challenging.
I figured we could all do with a break, and surely, fiction would be less terrifying. Here are a few things I found out about why writing fiction can be trickier to write than nonfiction:
Fiction is fiction but… it involves fragments of selves and fragments of lives, re-mixed.
So, you take the germ of a moment, a person, a scene and then you sort of play with it and see where it goes. It’s a lot of fun. You’ve got a story going. There’s a party (or two) that resemble parties you might happen to have been to. Then you’re writing something that didn’t happen, and you’re following that. That’s good. Keep going. One of your characters, who still has fragments of you, acquires a second lover. Soon, the story has some emotional truth you’re working through, but most of the facts are made up.
And … you can’t signal what’s true and what’s not.
When I said to my friend, novelist Pip Adam, that I thought fiction might be even more exposing than nonfiction, she nodded vigorously (as she does). With fiction, people feel free to make assumptions about what’s true and what’s not.
Horrifying.
Although also, of course, fiction provides disguise. As American feminist writer Vivian Gornick puts it, unlike memoirists, fiction writers have invented characters and speaking voices into which to pour all they ‘cannot address directly – inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires …’
Yep.
In fiction, you’ve lost the thoughtful, reflective, editorialising ‘I’ of nonfiction.
There’s no one there in fiction to say all the meditative, smart things you understood later.
There is a moment in my memoir, Where We Swim, where I feel uncomfortable about the circumstances around my family ziplining in the Amazon rainforest. I agonised over the scene, right through into editing, and ended up with a paragraph near the end of it with phrases like, ‘It’s only when thinking back that I’m forced to question …’ and ‘I still don’t know …’ While I don’t come out looking great in the moment of the story, I am pretty happy with where the writing landed.
In fiction, there’s not the same space for that. Fictional characters aren’t writing books about their lives; they’re living them.
In the stories in All Her Lives, many of my characters are living in other places, other decades and other centuries. I found I had to allow them to live in their own moments while at the same time, as a writer, staying attuned to how those moments might vibrate with, and reveal, our own. But none of this could be directly stated.
Fiction is terrifying because fictional characters do things that you, as a writer, know little about.
Characters are always entering rooms, stepping on to boats, and getting into conversations. As a writer, you have to follow them, even if they’re [English writer, feminist and mother of Mary Shelley] Mary Wollstonecraft in a rowboat in Norway in 1795, or sisters shopping in 1950s Wellington, or friends at a Devonport fair.
Your characters do things you have never done, and because you’re writing fiction, you’re also writing scene, which means you’re writing feelings and texture and bodies and the feel of what something was like. There is research, of course, but in the end, you must make it up.
Writing fiction is like balancing – for as long as you can manage – in the strange, creative, eerie space between reality and the imagination. It’s terrifying out there.
Fiction can end up in some pretty weird places. In the final story in All Her Lives, a disembodied Mary Shelley starts talking to her mother, who died giving birth to her. I have no idea where this came from, but I went with it. The rest of the book is largely realist.
Fiction is scary because you made it up, and what’s the point of that?
You just have to hope readers prove willing to go with you.
Fiction is scary because shit has to happen.
I write a poet’s nonfiction, lyric in structure, probing, exploratory, circling, returning to images and ideas. I am interested in families, the domestic, relationships between parents and grown-up children, how all this intersects with politics with a small p, and with the wider world.
In some ways, this prepared me well for writing fiction. However, there is a subtle difference between the kind of shift in understanding around which much nonfiction is shaped and the action of plot in fiction. I keep coming back to a definition of climax I picked up when working with another writer friend, Thom Conroy. Climax in fiction is the moment after which nothing can ever be the same.
Fiction, I decided rightly or wrongly, needed plot. Plot is hard.
And there’s dialogue. Also hard.
And sex. Even harder. But sex seems necessary in fiction – as a part of life – in a way that doesn’t seem so pressing in nonfiction, at least not in the kind I write.
It’s all been much more difficult than I imagined. But actually, I’ve loved it.
Something isn’t working? Change the setting altogether.
A character seems a bit solitary, or is doing too much thinking? Give them a best friend or a sister.
Too many siblings for even you to keep track of? Delete one, kill one, send another out of town. Need to raise the tension, or an outlet for a character’s unexpressed anger? Have their father give them a highly-strung dog. Or split a marriage down political lines.
Want to write about something you really don’t understand? Have a character work it out as best they can, flaws and all.
Surprised by a woman from one story turning up in another? Embrace it. Work out what she’s doing there – 30 years older, and so much more interesting than when she first appeared as a 20-year-old.
Curious about how a particular experience might feel? Start writing, see what happens.
But I can’t help it: I now feel some nonfiction brewing. So much safer. For a while I wasn’t that interested in writing any more from my own life. I wasn’t sure I had any more to say. But perhaps I’ve already entered the next life stage.
First, though, the characters in All Her Lives aren’t done with me. I’m writing them a novel.
Ingrid Horrocks teaches creative writing and will convene the nonfiction and poetry workshop at Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters masters’ programme next year. Her fiction debut, All Her Lives: Nine Stories, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press earlier this month (you can read the review here). Her memoir, Where We Swim, has just been reprinted.
