True Stories 64: A True Stories Wrap-Up

Wow. I can’t believe we’ve been talking about true stories for 15 MONTHS! And we could probably do another 15 months’ worth, because half of the films made are based on, or inspired by, true stories.

Why have I spent all this time on true stories? Because, quite often, that’s what I get hired to do. I’ve written scripts about Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Raymond Chandler, Edna St. Vincent Millay, to name a few of my favorites. And I know the hard choices that need to be made when writing about someone who lived and the events that actually happened in their lives.

I remember being in a meeting once where the director turned to the producer, as if she’d just had a brilliant idea, and said, “Couldn’t the mother die instead of the father?” Now, the person they were referring to—the main character—was affected by the death of her father. Her mother lived into old age. I recall watching the two of them talk about it and eventually conclude that the main character would have so much more of an emotional reaction if her mother died. And didn’t I think that was a great way to go?

Well, what can I say. All the time they were talking I was sitting, nodding, and inside SCREAMING “No, no—you can’t be serious!! Her mother DIDN’T die. That never happened. How could you want to change the actual truth of her life?!”

But I knew that if I told them they were nuts, there would be repercussions. I remember excusing myself to go to the restroom and bursting into tears. Because I felt a loyalty to that main character, I felt that telling her story—HER story—was what the film was all about. And inventing things that never happened just wasn’t right.

I then returned to the room with the producer and director and went over all the notes they’d given me to change in the script and praised them, and then I told them why I didn’t think the story would be helped by having the mother die. And I was absolutely impassioned.

After I finished talking, the director turned to the producer and said, “Well, I’m not going to make her change it, are you?”

And I didn’t have to make that misguided, untrue change.

The thing is, as the writer, you might very well react as I did in a meeting like that. But if you don’t stand up for the truth of your character’s story, what will you produce in the end? A film with no integrity, one that doesn’t actually TELL the true story.

We writers need to guard the truth when it comes to true stories. Any way we can. So I wish you courage—and lots of luck—as you work to do just that.

And let’s let Ernest Hemingway have the last word before we move next week to a new topic:

The writer's standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make of it an absolute truth.

Copyright © Diane Lake

03Sep23

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