Reality disguised

The people you know actually dread reading the novel you are about to write — they don't want to read about themselves, they don't want to be bored, and they fear embarrassment for everyone. You are, therefore free,

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Novels, and especially first novels, are often an embarrassment to those who know the novelists. Just ask the women who were close to Philip Roth. Just ask Pat Conroy's father. And so on.

First-time novelists tend to retell the key story from their own early lives. Their difficult childhoods. Their first awkward stabs at romance. Their most traumatic high school or college experiences. All this and more often winds up, slightly disguised, in first novels.

But even experienced novelists, who may have run out of profound personal experiences to write about, will still base characters on the people they know and base episodes in their novels on events from their own lives or the lives of people they know. Fiction is often the truth reimagined.

Flannery O'Connor was famous for her outrageous, often evil, characters. Yet she is said to have based these characters on the people she knew in the town where she lived. She simply exaggerated their flaws to such an extent that the individuals they were based on rarely recognized themselves. And few people in her town ever read her stories.

To know a novelist, as Jane Smiley observes, is often to fear being recognized in one of those novels. Serious novelists must steel themselves to not be overly intimidated by the concerns of others. These are the ones, in Smiley's view, who are therefore free.