Fictionalizing Dead People

Flannery O'Connor and Molly Ockett

Currently tweaking a book tentatively subtitled Four British Journalists Investigate the Hereafter. The four are well-knowns who have passed over the dark river. This a colloquial term formerly used in communities of Maine: Meaning Dead.

I've fictionalized dead people before, and plan to do so again (possibly) in a future project. I plan to include a link below for a Mythopoeic Society bulletin containing "Fictionalizing Lewis." This relates to SF/speculative fiction I wrote, subtitled Mark Twain and CS Lewis Talk Things over in the Hereafter.

For a series called The God’s Cycle, featuring increasing mythic emphasis, I fictionalized Molly Ockett, an historical figure in Maine history. For that I changed her name. Anyone familiar with our history would know Molly Ockett as Maine's great native Wabanaki storyteller and healer. Noted in the novel’s intro as inspiration for the fictive Jasper Mary, she was a real and telling figure in the Western Mountains of Maine. A few of her real-life episodes are given. She was a traveler of mountains and considered herself one with founders of communities established in Maine by settlers from Massachusetts.

When I fictionalize dead people, I don't play the ventriloquist and vice versa. With the Maine exception mentioned above, my dead writerly heroes are totally fictive and not meant to be taken as real. I cannot do a believable CS Lewis, for instance. For me the process is much more organic and fantastic. I do a variety of research for these "characters’.” Read their biographies/ autobiographies, words, debates, books, and what other people think of them. I hope to catch readers up into the story, but don't try to set their imaginations on the actual person created in the image of God.

I’ll hedge a bit here and say I hope readers get lost in the narrative and feel the reality of invented characters.

I've written elsewhere that to copy a real-life living person is to turn that one into raw material. I also don't find it creative. But for The God’s Cycle I may insert some things that happen to a variety of real people who haven’t died, or something a real live person did, or maybe particular features of a person, a blonde ponytail twist, a wicked grin—kind of like creating a patchwork quilt.

The end product should be alive—my own crafted sub-creation as a creator made in the image of God. Consider Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker. It's a fun and robust creative think-book.

Something I'd like to tackle is speculative fiction featuring Flannery O'Connor. Maybe that won't happen. So far I cannot think of anyone to pair her with. I am currently reading Good Things Out Of Nazareth, featuring her letters and correspondence with editors, priests and others. I've never read anything like this re Flannery O'Connor! Highly telling. I’m getting three sides to this compelling person by reading various genre material: her fiction, essays, letters.

I'm not a fan of her fiction. Sometimes I feel like Mark Twain when he said something—sort of—he'd like to dig up Jane Austen and hit her over the head with her own shinbone.

But then I fell for O'Connor’s thoughts and critical talents on reading her essays, particularly those collected in Mystery and Manners. There is nothing better for a writer to read. Or let us say it is standard with all the best stuff that's out there on the craft. Amazingly, she was a fan of Henry James and Hawthorne.

I think she should have learned to drive a car before writing “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. Also, I didn't quite believe characters sleepwalking into Misfit’s woods to their doom.

I have always wondered why she did not seem to tackle Catholics in her fiction. And here is an ironic quotation from the Nazareth book, chapter entitled “The First Priest Who Said Turkey-dog”:

All he knows [about the Communion rail] is what he reads in the papers. This is somewhat like my lapsed Catholic friend who says her mother goes to Communion and comes out of the church making uncharitable remarks about this one and that one. It don't do any good to tell this girl that this is just a characteristic of ladies of that age and generation and it doesn't mean anything. To her it means that the sacrament has no effect.

If it did any good to tell O'Connor the same about her self-righteous Southern Baptist—(?)—little old ladies, would we have had her groundbreaking stories?

In her words "It don't do any good," we get a flavor of her own colloquial conversation. It can come across pleasingly strong in her letters. Examples: “Merry Easter,” “CommonWheel,” “Thanks for the pitchers. I was glad to see myself looking so well.”

Will you be fictionalizing any dead people? —Sooner or later?

© S. Dorman November 2023

Here’s the embedded link to the Mythsoc bulletin with its “Fictionalizing Lewis” essay.

Also, Maine Humble-Brag