Portia – Why I like a little truth in my fiction
Fiction is great, and I love to read and watch all kinds, but I think it’s great when a story has realistic elements. There’s two ways I appreciate this most.
The first is when a tale is told by someone in the know. One of my favourite books of all time is The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Originally published under a pseudonym, The Bell Jar was semi-autobiographical and it shows. The main character’s struggle feels real, and you can learn a lot from it.
Another thing I love is brutally honest fiction. I doesn’t have to be based on a true story, just true to life. Patrick Marber’s play (and the movie that followed) Closer is a brilliant example of this, because it shows love, relationships and the way people behave in the ugliest way. They hurt each other, they cheat and the lie, and all because they are selfish. It’s a bleak view of the world, but these things do happen. Life isn’t always a fairy tale.
When I started writing books about the music industry, I wanted to give people an insight into the world. I wasn’t telling true stories, but I was heavily influenced by real events.
Don’t get me wrong, I do love a completely fictional tale that goes above and beyond my imagination, but a look into other people’s real lives can be nice sometimes too.
Find out more here:
http://portiamacintosh.tumblr.com/
https://twitter.com/PortiaMacIntosh
Bio:
When she was fifteen-years-old, Portia MacIntosh fell in with a bad crowd… rockstars.
After disappearing on tour and living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle for a few years, Portia landed a job in the music industry – but only so that she didn’t have to join the real world just yet.
Now in her twenties, Portia is ready to spill the beans on the things she has witnessed over the years. Well, kind of. If her famous friends knew that she was borrowing their lives to inspire her fiction, they would stop inviting her on tour and banish her from the inner circle. Then she really would have to rejoin the real world, and she’s still not ready.
Portia only started writing novels to share her secrets, but then she realised she actually quite liked writing – maybe even more than she likes living on a bus with a bunch of smelly boys – and has since tried her hand at writing about other things.
