THE LOGIC OF FICTION

By Sharon May

Almost 40 years ago, workers in a small town in Kentucky uncovered human bones. The next day, a retired sheriff confessed to the county attorney that he had buried a teen-aged friend near that site during World War II. Carbon dating revealed the bones were of Indian descent, and thus, could not be those of his friend. The former sheriff then recanted, stating that he was drunk when he confessed and probably was retelling bits and pieces of cases he worked.

I heard the recording of his confession, and to this day remember his excitement as he described the car in which he rode to the bootleg joint. His voice cracked with fear as he recounted the walk up the riverbank at gun point as he was forced to bury his friend. I heard the truth of his words, and felt compelled to tell his story.

All would have been fine if I were a journalist. Then I could have just reported the facts, and my job would have been done. But I wanted to write a novel about the sheriff and tried numerous times to find the narrative voice and the plot to tell the events of 1943 along with those of 1987.

A few years ago, I wrote a novella-length draft of the “truth.” But the sheriff I discovered in that draft wouldn’t have recanted once he took the risk to tell. The fear that quietened him at 16 was as real 35 years later. If Lafe had faced that fear and confessed, there would have been no going back. He was a man of his word. The conflict for him was whether to confess at all. To make the best story, my novel could not rely totally on the events as I experienced them.

How can something taken from reality not work in fiction? I mean, it’s real right? William Dean Howells, in the late 1800s, argued that realistic fiction is not only possible but that it required of writers. He believed reality could be captured by relying on the five senses and focusing on the ethical and moral dilemmas of the characters. But the Realistic movement gave way to Modernism and Post-modernism, both of which recognize the artifice of fiction.

Just because fiction is artificial doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work logically. Even Magical Realism and science fiction have physical and metaphysical rules that operate in the story.  

Readers expect a world that makes sense no matter how bizarre that world is. The story needs logic so that readers can envision and believe the plot. Characters’ actions and motivations have to be plausible. Conflicts need to be tangible and create angst and fear of the unknown for the reader as well as the characters. All of that creates a world with meaning, one a reader wants to visit.

After years of rumination and revision, I realized fiction doesn’t have adhere to reality, but it does have to ring true.