I noticed a pattern in the books I have enjoyed most lately – Barefoot Dreams of Petra Luna by Alda P. Dobbs, View from Pagoda Hill by Michaela MacColl, and Red, White, and Whole by Rajani Larocca. Each of these took the skeleton of a true family story and filled in the rest with fiction. I love these days when you can read a novel that sounds real and then google the author to find out how much was drawn from life. I did this with each author and found another tale almost as interesting as the one they had written. (I also noticed a second pattern. Each of these novels are classified as middle grade books which gives credence to my contention that today’s best writers are writing for middle grade, but I digress.)
After spotting this pattern, I decided to have a little fun analyzing my most recent publication in Thema Literary Magazine to see how much was true and how much was fiction in that short story. The premise for this issue was the theme, “A Postcard from the Past.” I had a World War I postcard that gave me a jump start. Here is my assortment for truth and fiction.
Truth:
· Mama had an Uncle Dee who served in France in World War I.
· He sent Mama a post card with a black-and-white picture of the village where he was serving.
· He married a girl he met in France named Lillie.
· The middle school protagonist for the story was closely modeled after myself – an oldest child, frequently given responsibility for younger siblings and cousins, who had rather be reading her book and listening in on adult conversations than playing childish games in the yard.
· Add in a few family names for the characters in addition to Dee and Lillie: Virgie, Dovie, and Susanna.
· Sunday afternoons in the South in those times meant dinner-on-the-grounds to accompany the all-day singings.
· A different uncle did tell me that dragonflies were really snake doctors.
Fiction:
· As far as I know, Uncle Dee didn’t leave a sweetheart at home when he went to France.
· If anybody objected to Uncle Dee’s service in the war, I never knew it.
· My mother, who got the post card, was his niece, rather than his sister.
· Uncle Dee’s mother did not die in childbirth, but lived to a ripe old age.
· The messages on the back of the real post card and the fictional one are almost entirely different.
I had great fun taking a few facts that I knew to be true and making up an entirely different story. I’m guessing those other writers did, too. Should you want the “rest of the story,” Thema makes its literary magazine available through its website ( https://themaliterarysociety.com ) where you can either purchase a subscription or single issues that interest you. (Full disclosure: I get no extra pay for this advertisement or for your purchase.)