As I’ve been revising my novel, particular situations have been reminding me of all the rules I’ve ever used and heard about writing fiction, and one of these is what I call the “it really happened” defence.

The “it really happened” excuse is the one bad writers (and I guess sometimes some good writers too) use when a passage in a story sounds unbelievable to the reader, but the writer won’t change it because it’s something they’ve modeled on personal experience and they therefore know, for certain, that it is possible for such a thing to happen in real life.

Some of the incidents in my novel are based on things that “really happened” to me while I lived in Japan, one of which is a friend suddenly giving me an hour long monologue on the horrors of her childhood, when I hadn’t known her that long. Apparently that was what she always did as she made new friends, perhaps it was a way of screening out friends who weren’t right for her, or just part of her desire to be absolutely honest at all times.

In any case, a similar incidentto this is now happening with a character in my novel, but I’m having trouble making it believable. I know that as a reader, it seems far too contrived for this character to suddenly blurt out her entire life history, especially as it’s quite terrible. Nobody would ever do that. “But it really happened!” I scream. “She really spoke like that! She really told me all that!”

Doesn’t matter. None of my readers will ever know that I sat in a small bar listening to my friend tell a story nearly exactly like the one I’m trying to write in this novel. They will only see a character in a novel written by a lazy writer who decided to just let dialogue blurt out the entire story, without trying to weave it into the story in a more “realistic” way.

So I guess it’s back to the drawing board for me to figure out a more authentic way to get this info across. To make it sound like it really could happen, I have to change the way it really happened. Illogical, but true.