When Fiction and Reality meet

When fiction and reality meet.

My first novel was out in 2011, and I felt pretty proud of myself. Yep, there it was, The Rock Hole, available on Amazon and online bookstores everywhere, in all formats. I was an author.

So in celebration, I wanted a little vacation from writing and picked up the top book on my TBR pile, leaned back in my recliner, and opened it to the first page.

“Call me Ishmael.”

My phone rang half a minute later. “Dang it!”

It was my editor. “Rev, did you see your review on Kirkus?”

“What’s Kirkus?”

Silence on the other end as she digested my question, likely wondering how she came to be working with someone so green. “It’s one of the premium book review magazines in the country.”

“Oh. Was it good?”

“They loved it! It’s a wonderful review and they’ve listed The Rock Hole as one of their Top Twelve Mysteries of 2011.”

“That’s nice.”

“Well, yeah.” She grew silent for a moment at my lack of enthusiasm. Truthfully, I didn’t know what any of that meant, and when I’m bumfuzzled, I tend to be quiet. “Now, let’s keep that momentum on the upswing. How’s your new novel going?”

“New one?”

“Sure! You have a pub date in a year.”

Uh, oh.

I’d never considered how fast they’d need the next book, so I told her it was coming along and hung up.

I needed another idea and fast. It came with the recollection of fifty pages I’d started years earlier. I spun it out to a police officer friend on the way to a ski destination in Colorado somewhere around 1984, and this is where we get into today’s topic, fiction vs. fact.

You see, I’d created the Red River series set in Paris, Texas and the existing rural community of Chicota. But I’d already heard about problems authors encountered when making minor mistakes or changes in real towns and geography. Readers delight in chastising authors when they read a one way street runs east, but in actuality, it goes west.

So I changed Paris to Chisolm, and Chicota to Center Springs. Now I can make up my own streets, buildings, and neighborhoods, overlapping my mental framework of those two places.

I did it for another reason, too. I wanted to set Burrows in a location that in reality was the old Speas Vinegar plant that used to sit beside the railroad tracks on the south side of Paris. But that building was too small for what I had in mind, so it became The Cotton Exchange, a massive multi-story building full of trash and with booby traps set by two psychotic hoarders.

That idea we’d discussed on the way to Colorado came from a story I’d read when I was a kid, about a pair of compulsive brothers who were hoarders in New York City and packed a four-story brownstone with tons of trash. One was killed when a booby trap crushed him in 1947, leaving his invalid brother to starve inside their vertical landfill. I loved the framework of the story, and it became the basis for Burrows that caught a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly.

Here’s the link to that fascinating story that gave me the idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collyer_brothers

Authors are world builders, but we don’t have to create everything from whole cloth. By simply fictionalizing real places, I can use them as a foundation to mine inspiration from reality, but not held to exact details.

You’d be surprised how many people at signings will ask about these places I’ve adapted, pleased with themselves that they’ve recognized the town or building. The good thing is not one individual tries to correct my descriptions.

I also include local history in my locations, even down to the weather. In Hawke’s Prey, the first book in the Sonny Hawke thrillers set in the Big Bend desert region of Texas, I wanted a massive snowstorm to build tension. Online research was unsatisfactory, because I needed detailed meteorological information to make it happen. I didn’t want to describe a massive snowstorm that couldn’t possibly happen there.

So I reached out to a local weatherman in the Dallas area, explained what I was doing. His co-meterologist is a fan of my books, and David Finfrock invited me into his house later that week.

When he greeted me at the door, he didn’t look like the well-dressed man I was used to seeing on TV, because he was in shorts and an aloha shirt instead of a coat and tie. No matter, though, we spent the afternoon going over paper weather maps left to him by local legendary DFW weatherman, the late Howard Taft.

It was exciting to work out how a once-in-a-century snowstorm could happen in that high desert region, but David explained the ingredients necessary for such an event. Weather was rolling in that day in the metroplex, and I enjoyed an unanticipated treat. He was watching his own channel on a huge flat panel TV in his den, and when his co-worker brought up the weather map to explain the coming storm, David hit the pause button and stood in front of the screen, detailing what could happen if certain factors came about.

Using those details I absorbed that rainy day in Dallas, my fictional storm paralyzed a fictional town of Ballard, Texas, (based on the real Alpine/Marfa area), providing a necessary plot twist that heightened the climax of the novel.

When the book came out, though, a few doubters told me it could never snow like that in Alpine, based solely on their own history in the area. But last year, those events I described came about, locking them down for several days under more than two feet of snow. More than one reader sent emails, texts, and links to me, saying they thought I was full of it until the weather proved them wrong.

That’s the power of good research.

And don’t worry about going down the occasional rabbit hole when you’re doing that kind of work. One such bunny tunnel led me to legends of a mysterious room under the local courthouse in Alpine. That’s all they were, legends, but supposition of what could be down there sparked an idea that became an integral part of Hawke’s Prey.

I’m now working on a traditional western set in the eastern Oklahoma Indian Territories back in the 1880s. Some of the towns there really existed, but I’ve created fictional towns in the real mountainous landscape, because I needed certain buildings and geographical backdrops to push the story forward.

I’m not writing history, here, but fiction based on history and authenticity.

Certain things such as low-water crossings on the Red River and ferries are part of the past in those areas, but I wanted my Red River and my towns. Once the characters made the crossing back into Texas, I utilized a real town as part of the plot, but I changed a few things in 1883.

Why that year? Because I wanted my character to carry the first pump shotgun and it was released in 1882. I’ve built novels on just such foundations, but they needed to be changed for the sake of the story.

Dream yourself up a dining room with a gorgeous table set for eight, complete with crystal wine glasses and flickering candles. Imagine the rest of the room now, dressed in your tastes as an author. These are the components that are yours alone, but underneath the pure white tablecloth is the bare reality to build upon…a plain table full of nicks, scars, and watermarks.

Happy writing.

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About Reavis Wortham

Two time Spur Award winning author Reavis Z. Wortham pens the Texas Red River historical mystery series, and the high-octane Sonny Hawke contemporary western thrillers. His new Tucker Snow series begins in 2022. The Red River books are set in rural Northeast Texas in the 1960s. Kirkus Reviews listed his first novel in a Starred Review, The Rock Hole, as one of the “Top 12 Mysteries of 2011.” His Sonny Hawke series from Kensington Publishing features Texas Ranger Sonny Hawke and debuted in 2018 with Hawke’s Prey. Hawke’s War, the second in this series won the Spur Award from the Western Writers Association of America as the Best Mass Market Paperback of 2019. He also garnered a second Spur for Hawke’s Target in 2020. A frequent speaker at literary events across the country. Reavis also teaches seminars on mystery and thriller writing techniques at a wide variety of venues, from local libraries to writing conventions, to the Pat Conroy Literary Center in Beaufort, SC. He frequently speaks to smaller groups, encouraging future authors, and offers dozens of tips for them to avoid the writing pitfalls and hazards he has survived. His most popular talk is entitled, My Road to Publication, and Other Great Disasters. He has been a newspaper columnist and magazine writer since 1988, penning over 2,000 columns and articles, and has been the Humor Editor for Texas Fish and Game Magazine for the past 25 years. He and his wife, Shana, live in Northeast Texas. All his works are available at your favorite online bookstore or outlet, in all formats. Check out his website at www.reaviszwortham.com. “Burrows, Wortham’s outstanding sequel to The Rock Hole combines the gonzo sensibility of Joe R. Lansdale and the elegiac mood of To Kill a Mockingbird to strike just the right balance between childhood innocence and adult horror.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The cinematic characters have substance and a pulse. They walk off the page and talk Texas.” —The Dallas Morning News On his most recent Red River novel, Laying Bones: “Captivating. Wortham adroitly balances richly nuanced human drama with two-fisted action, and displays a knack for the striking phrase (‘R.B. was the best drunk driver in the county, and I don’t believe he run off in here on his own’). This entry is sure to win the author new fans.” —Publishers Weekly “Well-drawn characters and clever blending of light and dark kept this reader thinking of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.” —Mystery Scene Magazine

16 thoughts on “When Fiction and Reality meet

  1. Good morning, and good post!

    One of the best things about being a writer, IMO, is using our own experiences to stretch and create a new world that is close, but not identical, to one that exists. My first novel was set in what is now Grand Teton NP, because we lived and worked in the park 13 years before I wrote the book and it remains my favorite place on earth. Those mountains! Couldn’t change them, but I could certainly make up a ranch and 1800s town.

    I did meticulous research for a story set in Iowa in 1978, going so far as getting daily weather and corn and bean prices. In the end, the real place I wanted to use didn’t work for the plot, plus I was using some real events and didn’t want readers to recognize them, so the fictional town of Wauketon was born.

    If writers hadn’t experienced real life, hadn’t read news stories and magazine articles, much less absorbed the information in countless books, both fiction and non-fiction, there wouldn’t be the vast array of novels out there. So, yes, fiction and reality have to have a connection first. And how fun is that!

    • I spent several summers back in the 80s up there shooting landscapes and enjoyed the pretties area in this country. Movies shot up there have a special look, and those include Shane and Spencer’s Mountain.

      Writers have to read and experience the world, in my opinion.

      Thanks for reading and commenting!

  2. I love revisiting places I love – our old house in New York, the pier on Mobile Bay at the end of our street when I was in high school, cherry blossom time in Tokyo, the woods behind our place in Maine. I also enjoy redoing and redecorating. I used to make things up from scratch but with so little time to write starting with a blueprint (places known and loved) is a timesaver.

    • Revising places we’ve known is interesting, especially after I use them in fiction. Sometimes I find that the world I created has taken on so many aspects of reality that it’s hard to tell the difference between the two in my own recollections.

      Funny how everything seemed so much larger in my mind, too, than in reality.

  3. Best two words from your post, Rev: “Based On.”
    The hardest setting I had to deal with was when I took a character from a ‘based on’ town in central Oregon to my home town at the time. I didn’t want to keep bugging my sister-in-law for details about that based on town so I figured it would be easier to be able to look out the window, etc., for setting, climate, foliage, etc.
    What I hadn’t considered was now, I had to get everything RIGHT. I remember calling a cop contact and asking the color of the carpet in the sheriff’s department. He was cool about it (he didn’t know, and he worked there) and invited me for a tour.
    But man, ‘based on’ makes life so much easier.

    • Thanks, Terry. You know, there are details that drive me crazy, such as what kind of vehicles do DPS officers drive.

      I try to keep as much actual detail as possible when necessary, but the pressure is off when you can deviate from the blueprint.

      I’m having a ball writing this western I’m working on. Starting in the Winding Stair mountains of eastern Oklahoma, I’m not tied down to many specifics, and thankfully there’s no current technology to deal with, other than checking to see where the rail and telegraph lines might have run.

      Of course, I’ve stayed true to the people and history, but this manuscript was freeing.

  4. The most interesting thing about writing fiction is that puzzle piecing mix of reality and what’s made up. It can be a headache at times too, but it’s so much fun to explore story possibilities. And it creates so many ideas!

  5. Great post, Rev. It’s good to remind ourselves that, as writers, we can literally create worlds, with an unlimited special effects budget, no location shooting fees, and can invent whatever we like. With my Empowered urban fantasy series, I had created an alternate history, which allowed me to play around with details of the U.S. and other parts of the world as needed. With my library mystery series, I’ve created a fictional neighborhood here in Portland, which allows me to do as you did and draw on real places but change them as needed. So many possibilities.

    • That’s the fun of being world builders!

      Robert B. Howard And Phillip Jose Farmer are only two excellent authors who come to mind that showed me how it was done.

      I wish I could have figured all this out long before I did. Happy writing.

  6. Thought-provoking topic, Rev. Love the snowstorm research and how it came true.

    My first book was originally published in 2016 and dealt with cyberattacks on the power grid, then a little known occurrence. Then they started happening in real life. Readers would send me links to news stories, saying, “This is what your book predicted.”

    My series is set in my home area. Most locales are real. But sometimes a story needs crooked cops or other villains in prominent positions. Since I didn’t want to alienate local law enforcement or risk libel, I invented a nearby town where corruption is tolerated. Readers say, “I looked at maps and can’t find Foys Junction.”

    That’s cuz it ain’t there. It’s all in my mind.

  7. I based my dystopian novel on a totally imaginary city, Deres-Thorm, complete with a sprinkling of the language, Deresthian, which has two very different dialects, urban and rural. My MC, Horus Blassingame, of Albion, through some quirk of his language tutor, has been unwittingly instructed in the rural dialect. Thus he must deliver his carefully-rehearsed speech in Anglic or seem like an ignorant bumpkin. Things go downhill from there.

    My picaresque novel takes place in Zaragoza (named after Caesar Augustus), Spain, with a flashback to that awful night in Bilbao when he was a youth. There is also an excursion to Tarragona, fleeing the wrath of his rival, Don Carlos, whose poetry recital he attended, correcting him at every opportunity, and worse. Google Maps revealed my imaginary Zaragoza to be faulty, so I amended it. There is no place in Europe I’d rather visit.

  8. I’m sure that 2 feet of blizzard you mentioned made some folks here choke on their coffee.

    I wrote a number of my paranormal novels using my city as the template for Moravia, North Carolina. I called it my Eerie, Indiana, version of High Point. It allowed me the freedom to fudge on the gardens around the country club while giving me a sense of how long it takes to drive from a specific warehouse to the hero’s home. In my book bible, I also did a list like Nathanton=Greensboro and Chestnut Drive=Ash Street to keep everything in my head.

    I highly recommend EERIE, INDIANA for adults and kids. It was a kid’s show that was a mix of STRANGER THINGS and the TWILIGHT ZONE, and it was one of the cleverest shows I’ve ever seen. Plus, it had John Astin.

  9. For those who use a real weird or unusual event, historical story, etc, I highly recommend an author’s note at the end of the novel giving the facts. It will cut out some of those smug fan letters and convention harangues.

    In my first novel, my heroine’s big part of figuring out the murderer’s identity involved the rivalry between Poe and Thomas Holley Chivers, and Chivers’ absolute belief that Poe plagiarized Chivers’ poetry. In my author’s note, I mentioned that Chivers was real, and he was bonkers about Poe’s supposed plagiarism, but the missing box of Chivers’ correspondence I used to explain that mystery was never found.

  10. If Poe were drinking at the time, anything is possible. But he stopped drinking before he died, refusing alcohol offered by the hospital. No active alcoholic would do that.

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