Twisting the Facts to Create Fiction
May 2021 Gimme Five: Twisting the Facts to Create Fiction
By Julie Tollefson
A headline catches your eye. A tweet piques your interest. Maybe, you think, you could make something of that.
This month, Laura McHugh, whose novels are not so much ripped from the headlines as rooted in the fertile ground where fact meets imagination, shares five ways to take inspiration from true crime and transform it into gripping fiction.
1) Be choosy — Newspapers, magazines, websites, and social media are all full of accounts of misdeeds, nefarious activities, and people who have been wronged, a virtual buffet of ideas for the crime writer in search of a story. Very few inspire Laura to write.
Sometimes, though, an account will hit home in a way that she simply can’t ignore.
“It’s usually a story that I want to explore further, especially crimes that don’t have all the answers,” Laura says.
When her mind returns to a story — or one tiny, fascinating detail of a story — again and again, when she finds herself trying to find fictional explanations to solve a real-life mystery, that’s when she knows she’s hit on a winning idea.
2) Facts are seeds — Don’t feel that you are tied to the facts of the actual crime, says Laura. Sticking too closely to reality can stifle your storytelling.
Once an idea has taken hold, Laura might read an article or two about the case, but then she lets her imagination run free and follows where her characters lead her.
“They have their own lives and their own motives and desires,” Laura says.
That’s especially true for Laura, and her characters, when it comes to the ins and outs of law enforcement procedure. “I don’t necessarily need to know how all of that works,” she says. “Usually my protagonists come from the perspective of an amateur who doesn’t know all those things, either.”
3) Make the story your own — Twist the facts, mash them up with details snatched from other news accounts that have caught your interest, and weave a brand-new narrative.
In her forthcoming novel, Laura took inspiration from several unrelated crimes involving women who have been abducted but whose stories are questioned when they manage to escape their abductors or are let go.
One case involved Sherri Papini, a young woman in California whose reported abduction and subsequent release made national headlines. The details of her story didn’t add up in the eyes of investigators working her case.
“Her story seemed so bizarre,” Laura says. “I just kept thinking is she really telling the truth or did something else happen to her and she’s too scared to tell the truth? That sent me down the road of girls who are abducted and let go.”
Another crime that figured strongly in the story involved a teenage girl who had been killed in the southern Missouri town where Laura had lived. “She had been home-schooled and isolated. A lot of times those kids are subject to abuse. No one knows because no one is checking up on them,” Laura says.
The two cases together inspired What’s Done in Darkness, due out June 22, in which Laura tells the story of a young woman who survived her abduction from a remote Arkansas farm and now might be the only one who can save another missing girl.
4) Ensure that your fiction is fiction — Laura’s The Wolf Wants In grew from questions she had about her brother’s unexplained death.
“I had to be careful that nothing in the story made him recognizable and that no one from his life would appear to be implicated,” she says.
The process of fictionalizing the story stripped away those concerns but the novel remained true to her core vision: the search for answers after the loss of a sibling.
“When I’m writing something inspired by a crime, it kind of naturally sheds a lot of fact to the point that all that’s left is inspiration,” Laura says.
5) The people are the story — Be sensitive in how you incorporate true crime into your novels. For Laura, that means keeping the focus on the characters and how they are affected, as she did in her debut, Weight of Blood, which explored sex trafficking in the rural Midwest.
“I wanted people to realize this does occur in small towns and rural areas, but I didn’t want it to be seen as sensationalizing violence against women,” she says. “I wanted to write through the lens of the victims and their families. That was an important piece for me.”
Julie Tollefson's short fiction has appeared in Life is Short and Then You Die: Mystery Writers of America Presents First Encounters with Murder as well as other anthologies and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. She is editor of the Mystery Writers of America Midwest newsletter.