Robbing The Headlines: Repurposing True Events in Fiction

Abstract

Robbing The HeadlinesRepurposing True Events in Fiction Amanda Jo Runyon (bio) Early in the semester, my Appalachian literature students had the opportunity to have a Skype conversation with author Silas House. They had just finished reading his novel A Parchment of Leaves, and I hoped they would ask him meaningful and intelligent questions about the novel, questions that would lead to a deeper understanding of themes and characters [End Page 87] or good writing in general. Unsurprisingly, one of the first questions that came from the group was, where do you get your ideas? Many writers and instructors squirm at this question. It doesn’t necessarily indicate to the author that you have read and thought about their material, nor does it engage the particular craft decisions writers spend painstaking hours making. It could be considered a generic, blanket question. In the essay, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” Alice Mattison says readers ask this question of writers as if authors might respond, “I order them online” or “In the supermarket, near the pancake mix.”1 Admittedly, it is a common question, but it is also an important and valid question, particularly for the writer of fiction. Mattison agrees that the curiosity of readers is understandable. She says, “everything about writing is suspect; we may as well face that. Making up a story out of nothing is something like trafficking in the occult.”2 But no fiction story is ever made up “out of nothing.” Ideas for fiction come from life, from the experiences or observations of the author in the real world. The real question, then, is how do fiction writers decide how much of the real world to use in their invented stories? When I was a graduate student at Morehead State University, the instructor for my Advanced Fiction Workshop, Crystal Wilkinson, asked our class to think about what haunts us as writers. What images or themes do we find reoccurring on our pages? These things, she suggested, could be where we draw our ideas. Later, in a fiction workshop at the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, I heard Gwyn Hyman Rubio lecture on how to forage for ideas. Rubio suggested good writers are often thieves. We could rob from the cradle; that is, we could write stories about our own pasts, particularly, our childhoods. Rubio’s second suggestion was that writers could rob the grave for ideas, or write the stories of their ancestors. Finally, she [End Page 88] said, we could rob other authors, relying on a variation of a theme we’ve encountered in other books. In my own fiction, I have robbed ideas from the cradle, the grave, and the themes of other authors, but during Rubio’s lecture I found myself thinking back to Crystal Wilkinson’s workshop question, and realized that none of these things haunt my writing. I am haunted by the stories of true events that occur in the community around me. I spend a lot of time in the archives of my university, scouring old newspapers and photographs that give me insight to events that have shaped and influenced my hometown. I am fascinated by events that have such dramatic effect on a community that they are remembered and passed down, in some variation, for years. I have a tendency to, as Rubio might phrase it, rob the headlines. To understand how I might use true stories in my own work, I need to shift the focus from where I get ideas to how I use ideas. I write about actual events, not to recreate them, but to repurpose them. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to repurpose is to “change something so it can be used for a different purpose.” An image search of the verb will result in pictures of crib beds transformed into hallway benches, kitchen forks turned into windchimes, or other common, household items made into something new. Recently, a friend gave me a gift of a wreath made out of an old copy of The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow. The idea is that once an object has lived out its use in one form, it can be remade, not into the same object, but...