“I
gave you good script,” Ma to Alan
Cocktail Sticks, a
play by Alan Bennett
The
writer Alan Bennett has been very open about how much he is inspired by
real-life events. He has written plays and film scripts all inspired by real-life
events; he has written several volumes of autobiographical essays, and every
year or so he publishes extracts from his diary. I’ve seen and read all of them
and enjoyed them so much. In his autobiographical play Cocktail Sticks,
about his relationship with his parents, the character of Ma (based on his
mother) says, “I gave you good script,” meaning he has used so many of
the actual things she said in his writing.
I
cannot class myself in the same writing league as Alan Bennett, but I take so
much inspiration from real-life events. That inspiration seems to fall into
three different types.
The first is when I want to write about
events or attitudes that have made me angry or upset. This is when I use
fiction to explore how I feel about a subject or when I want to write about
attitudes in order to expose the negative/destructive nature of them. My short
story I Always Knew is an example of this. It was the height of the
Jimmy Savile scandal and I heard an elderly journalist on the radio saying that
he’d always known about Savile’s crimes. My anger led me to explore that
attitude, those people who are always “wise” after a tragedy, in this story.
Secondly, I can find inspiration in
news headlines and real events. Sometimes it a headline and a short news item
that inspires my imagination. I don’t do anymore research, instead I let my
imagination dwell on those sparse descriptions or even single event and then I
fill out the events and with characters I’ve created. Without researching the
events any further I can make sure I am not using the people and their tragedy
for my own fiction, that my story is a complete work of fiction. A Family
Christmas is an example of me using this type of inspiration. There was a
mass shooting in America, on Christmas Eve, the year before I wrote this story.
I learnt no more about that tragedy but my imagination filled in the blanks and
I created a story that explored a theme that leapt out at me from this tragedy.
I
don’t always search out stories of death and tragedy, all kinds of things in
the media can set my imagination off running. I read an interview with the
actor Russell Tovey where he said a throwaway comment, but that comment set my
imagination off. The result was the story That One Big Role.
I
have also been researching historical events for a series of stories. These
take a lot more research and less of my imagination filling in the blanks,
though some of that is still needed. With these stories I want to examine a historical
event from a fictional character’s point of view, find the human story inside
the facts. These stories do take a lot of work, but I don’t want to stop writing
them, the research is fascinating. The Trial of the Century is the first
one in this style I wrote.
Thirdly, I find inspiration from my
own life. It can either be just one small factor that I then spin off into a
whole story, or else it can form a larger part of a story, or else I
fictionalise something that happened to me as a way to explore what and why
that thing happened.
Boxing Day 1975 is a short story of mine that was inspired by one event
from my life. When I was a young child, on Boxing Day, together with my family
I watched the big film on television that evening, One Million Years BC.
That was the only part I took into the story, it is certainly not based on my
own family but I do vividly remember how my family all sat down together to
watch the same television film.
I
met my first boyfriend in 1987 but our relationship did not last. Our break-up
was different, difficult and not that conventional. I used that break-up scene,
almost word-for-word from real life, as the opening scene of my story Out ofthe Valley. I used this story to explore obsessive love and not being able
to let go of an ex-lover, none of which was my reaction to the end of that
relationship, though this story did go through many rewrites over the years
with the wish-fulfilment ending being quickly dropped.
Then
there are those real-life encounters that play on my mind and imagination and
form the bases of some of my stories. Jonathan Roven Is Lost (a story in
my collection Case Studies in Modern Life) is a story that started off
in that way. Through my job, I saw the effect dementia has on the partners of
those people with it. My blog here gives a much fuller picture of how
that story was created.
For
me, there isn’t just one way that I find inspiration, but I guess that is the
same for so for many writers, but using inspiration and facts from real life is
very important to me, I want my stories to have that taste of authenticity.
I
don’t use overheard dialog in my writing, like many writers do, because the few
times I’ve heard anything decent I’ve forgotten the actual words by the time I
get home. But I do use real people in my writing or people’s attitudes and beliefs.
I don’t use direct copies of people; I don’t feel comfortable if readers can
easily identify the person who was the inspiration for a character. So often I
combine different things from different people—the attitude from one person,
the clothes style from another and the physical appearance from another. But
what really fascinates me are people’s attitudes and beliefs and how they
affect their lives and how people’s personalities react in different
situations.
For
me, I find inspiration in so many different ways, so many different things can
spark and inspire my imagination, but in the end it is my imagination that
forms the story from whatever the inspiration is, though I always work to create
authenticity in my fiction. I hope my stories bear that out.
I
do remember one of the classic things my mother said, though I have never found
the right story to use it in.
I
was in my early teens and had just come home from school one afternoon and my
mother was unpacking her shopping.
“I
won’t buy anymore lemonade, all you lot ever do is drink it,” my mother said.
“What
should we do with it, wash in it?” I said.
“You
know what I mean,” she told me. And I did.
Happy
reading
Drew
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