Event Recap: Fact Into Fiction– A Balancing Act by Brian Francis
On April 15, as part of the Keep Toronto Reading Festival, four renowned writers discussed the issues, complexities and blurred lines of incorporating factual events and people into their fiction. Hosted by Toronto Reference Library’s current writer-in-residence, Marina Endicott (The Little Shadows), the panel included Greg Hollingshead (Bedlam); Helen Humphreys (Nocturn) and Nino Ricci (The Origin of Species.)
Endicott began the evening by telling the true story behind the library’s One Book community read, The Cellist of Sarajevo. In the novel, author Steven Galloway writes of a cellist who risks being killed by snipers in order to commemorate the lives of 22 people killed during the siege of Sarajevo while waiting in a line to buy bread. The real cellist of Sarajevo, Vedran Smailović, took issue with Galloway’s novel. Endicott asked how the writers work on their material without intruding on the rights and privacy of others.
When it comes to writing about people close to him, Hollingshead admitted that he doesn’t feel “free,” mainly because he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. It wasn’t so much an “aesthetic” issue as it was a “personal” issue.
Humphreys admitted that it’s easier to write about real people after they’ve died.
However, when it comes to historical fiction, Humphreys pointed out that history is always open to interpretation. Her process is to find one thing that is factually accurate, discover the emotional truth of that object and use that as her starting point.
Ricci pointed out that no one can challenge another person’s version of things because there’s so much within history that we’ll never know. “How can we rely on any one version of the truth?” he asked.
When it came to research, Ricci said that he tries to learn enough so that he can make the leap into that time period; that he develops a sense of that world and the characters which inhabit it. The goal of that research, he said, is that we “hope to recover something that expands our sense of humanity.”
Ricci also commented on an Alice Munro essay, “What is Real?” in which she writes that most of her stories come from the world, that there’s a truth that acts as the story’s starting point. Ricci stated that it is often this “truth” that becomes the touchstone for writers as they build their fictional worlds around that truth.
As Hollingshead stated, “Some details are irreplaceable.”
Check back here for a video of the event, or visit our YouTube channel.
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