The real world is chaotic. It’s also not fair. One of the reasons we tell each other stories in the first place is to make sense of the chaos. In the real world the bad guys don’t get their comeuppance, the girl doesn’t pick the nice guy (and often doesn’t pick the villain either), and the hero doesn’t arrive just in the nick of time (usually because he’s somewhere else entirely and doesn’t have a clue that the heroic action he’s always dreamed of taking is even on the cards. As writers we take facts, whisk them up in our imagination, add a pinch of wish-fulfilment, a ladle full of personal prejudice, then bake the result into what we hope is a story that manages to be both entertaining and coherent.
In my experience it is actually quite rare to come across a real-life series of events that feel like they could have been lifted directly from a short story. Factual tales can often be crazier than fiction, consisting of twists and turns that writers would never get away with. Sometimes they are almost there, with a plot that almost works, until the point where it doesn’t. But mostly real world stories are just too boring, and only work if the writer jazzes them up a bit.
But sometimes they do happen. While surfing my feeds last week, catching up with local news in South-East London, I came across a series of articles about a story that seems to leave the fiction writer with nothing left to do. You can find the details on the NewsShopper website here, though you’ll have to fight your way through the adds first.
The basics of the story are as follows:
- An incredibly popular and hardworking street cleaner tells a local shopkeeper that he is saving up for a holiday to Portugal. He has been once before and really wants to return.
- The shopkeeper really values the man’s work and, impressed by how hard her works and cheerful he remains even during the heatwave, sets up a fundraiser to cover the cost of the holiday for him.
- Thanks to the cleaners popularity the fundraiser overshoots its target, setting him up for the holiday of a lifetime.
- His employer, let’s call them the Big Bad Company, unfortunately learns of the fundraiser and informs everyone that he cannot accept the gift because it breaks the terms of their contract with the local Council.
- Everyone is disappointed, and even though the big bad company, who turns out not to be so bad after all, agrees to match the fundraiser so that all the money can be donated to a charity of the cleaner’s choice, the outcome remains unsatisfactory.
- At the eleventh hour a white night appears in the form of a travel company. They hold a competition, with the prize of a holiday to Portugal, provided the winner meets the arduous criteria laid down in the terms and conditions.
- Fortunately the only possible winner who meets all the conditions, is our protagonist, the cleaner.
- Everyone is delighted, our cleaner gets his holiday, and a local charity gets a very unexpected but welcome donation.
It is an excellent, heart-warming story, and is written up well by local journalists. I might have got some of the facts wrong, but I’m sure that if transposed into fiction in its current form it would work perfectly. But that would be too easy. The job of the fiction writer, is to see beyond the facts in order to explore the possibilities. To that end, consider the following questions:
- The caring shopkeeper, who could be the main protagonist in our fictional story, appears to have been motivated by genuine kindness. But what other possible motivations could have lead her to take the same actions? As a hint, I couldn’t help remembering the Sherlock Holmes story “The red-headed league”.
- Our cleaner said he wanted to go to Portugal, but what if there was a more sinister reason for his desire, or what if he had no intention of going on holiday and wanted the money for some other reason that he couldn’t share?
- The obstacle used by the cleaner’s terms of employment was, in the event, fairly easily overcome. Could it have been more insurmountable in a way that heightened the tension of the tale?
- What were the motives of the white night who stepped in at the last moment. Maybe they were just trying to do a nice thing, or maybe they had an ulterior motive of their own.
These questions raise a few alternative ways of extending this tale into a work of fiction but the options are limitless. All that remains is for me to wish the real life man in question a fabulous holiday, and hope that you enjoy my take on the story which I will share below.
Happy writing!
