When Fiction Imitates Real Life

I promised in my last behind-the-scenes journal post that this week I’d share something unexpected about two relationships in my story of The Catalina.

But I decided for this journal post to share something about only one of the relationships, and I will keep the other for another time.

On our monthly video call, one of my fiction writing buddies asked me a question that taught me a great lesson about authors and stories they tell.

The question was this: David, how much of the relationship between Roy and Ruth reflects your relationship with Liz?

My immediate response was, ‘I don’t think all that much.’

I was wrong.

Roy and Ruth Langley are two of the main characters in the story. In an earlier post, I introduced you to Roy.

Ruth and Roy got married back in 1931. They became best friends after Roy left Koondrook as a twenty-one year old in 1922 and found work in Bendigo, where the two of them met. Their love for each other developed into that rare type of relationship that only best friends who fall deeply in love know and cherish gratefully.

Ruth’s calm, caring, always hopeful approach to life, supported by her strong Christian beliefs is the glue that holds their relationship together. At times though it hits a nerve with Roy who sees the world in a lot more harsh and defined way than Ruth.

Roy’s ability to just get things done, his whatever-it-takes attitude to life and his gentlemanly nature was what first attracted him to Ruth. As the story develops, some of those qualities are shadowed by trauma from the war.

Roy and Ruth struggle to deal with some life decisions they’ve both made. Those decisions strain their relationship and their different but stoic approaches to dealing with those decisions have consequences.

Their banter is sometimes funny, other times tense, and their love for each other underpins their words and actions. Most of the time.

But that's life isn’t it.

Now, you might be thinking which bits of all that reflect Liz and my relationship? Well, we were certainly best friends before we were married back in 1984, and even after all our time together, raising two boys who have both become men we are so very proud of, Lizzie and I are still best friends and still very deeply in love.

And I will share that some of the banter in the story, especially the humour, when I read it again now, it's like listening to a recording.

As to what else (if anything) about Roy’s and Ruth’s relationship reflects mine and Liz’s, well, I’ll keep that to myself but will remind you that The Catalina and its characters are fiction.  

My second draft work has reached the stage where I’m in my third full read through. But this is the first time reading word for word, line by line, since changing the whole story from writing it in present tense to past tense.

I’m only up to chapter five, and am continuing to cut, shape and polish as I’m working through it.

Next week, I’ll let you know my progress, what else I’m learning and what changes I decide to make along the way.