How writers turn reality into a story

Last Saturday, I promised to return to a question that has occupied my mind for two weeks: What actually happens between the moment a writer encounters reality and the moment when that reality appears as a story? I am convinced that creative writers conduct research. That is why I promised to unveil the conceptual model I have been developing to explain how this happens.

Today, I keep that promise. I call it the Narrative Transformation Model (NTM). This is a conceptual model that explains the process through which a creative writer transforms observation, experience, research and reflection into a narrative. I am not suggesting that every writer consciously follows these stages in precisely the same order. No. What I am proposing is a way of understanding the creative process.

Let me begin with an important proposition. A writer does not simply invent a story, but first encounters reality, interrogates it and transforms it. When we read a novel, we encounter characters, conversations, places, conflicts and events, but we rarely stop to ask where these materials came from. We see the finished story but not the long process that produced it.

Specifically, we do not see the conversations the writer remembered, the books consulted, the places visited and the questions asked. Yet all these things eventually find their way into the story.

So, where does a story really begin? I think it begins with curiosity. A writer sees something and becomes curious about it. A conversation may raise a question. An encounter may leave the writer wondering. A childhood memory may refuse to disappear. For me, it is usually a newspaper story that provokes fascination. Sometimes, a place may evoke an unexplained feeling. In essence, curiosity is the spark.

But curiosity alone does not produce a story. The writer must enter the world that has aroused that curiosity. This is what I call immersion. The world becomes a field of inquiry. A writer working on a historical story must enter that historical world through reading and investigation. The writer then begins to observe. Observation is different from merely seeing. We all see people every day.

 Let me explain what I mean by drawing from one of my own stories, Shadows of Love. Of all the stories I have written, this is perhaps the one that many young readers remember most vividly. The story did not emerge from a single incident or a single person. It brought together many people, experiences and characters I had encountered in the course of my life. Over the years, particularly through my work at the university, I have encountered many different kinds of people. Some have remained in my memory because of their personalities. When I was writing Shadows of Love, some of these encounters became part of the raw material from which the fictional world was created.

Looking at my characters in this book, I have met many Mwende-like characters at the university, young and sometimes naive women whose vulnerability can expose them to exploitation by lecturers and other people in positions of authority. I have encountered Nabson-like characters, people whose narcissism and manipulation can be deeply destructive to those around them. I have met outgoing girls like Sheila, whose confidence and social energy make them memorable.

 I have also encountered strange people such as witch doctors like Mutisi-Mutiso, whose personality provided material for my imagination. But none of these characters is simply a portrait of one person. What do I mean? A novelist observes people, but does not necessarily reproduce them. The characters in Shadows of Love are products of transformation. In this case, life supplied the materials, but my imagination supplied the architecture. This is precisely what I mean by Narrative Transformation.

In other words, the writer is constantly gathering material, interrogating and transforming it. This is where investigation enters the process. If I am writing about a particular disease or social realities, imagination cannot substitute for knowledge. I must investigate the phenomena and learn about them.

Research eventually disappears from the finished story, but it does not disappear from the process that produced it. The next stage is reflection. The writer does not merely collect information. The writer thinks about it and asks difficult questions: What does this experience mean? Why did this person behave in that way? These questions lead to understanding and the writer's imagination begins to take over.

This brings me to what I consider the most important stage in my model: imaginative transformation. The writer does not reproduce reality like a photocopying machine. No. A real person may become several fictional characters. Several people may be combined to create one character. An event that happened in one place may be relocated to another. Something that never happened may be created from things that actually happened.

The writer takes materials encountered in reality and subjects them to imagination. Reality enters the writer's creative consciousness and emerges in another form. That is why fiction can be invented and still tell us profound truths about life. The novelist does not necessarily tell us exactly what happened but creates something that never happened to help us understand what happens.

Once transformation has taken place, the writer must undertake narrative construction. The materials gathered through curiosity, immersion, observation, investigation and reflection must now become a story. The writer has to give voice to characters, sequence the events and create a setting. Ideas must acquire symbolism and conflict must generate movement. That is when we begin to construct a narrative world that the reader can enter.

The reader does not see research notes but only encounters a world that feels historically authentic. This, to me, is one of the great paradoxes of creative writing. The better the research is transformed into narrative, the less visible the research becomes. The final step is narrative validation.

A story must persuade the reader that its world is believable. This means that the story must possess internal coherence, emotional credibility and authenticity. When a reader closes a novel and says, "This felt real," something important has happened. The reader is saying that the writer has created a convincing world. That is the ultimate test of the transformation.

My Narrative Transformation Model therefore moves from curiosity to immersion, observation to investigation, reflection to imaginative transformation, narrative construction and finally narrative validation. I hope you can now see the science of serious creative writing.

 Prof Egara Kabaji is a writer, educationist and researcher based at Masinde Muliro University. He is also the Vice President of the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA) and the Chancellor of Mt. Kigali University, Rwanda.