Title: Rainy Day Sisters
Author: Kate Hewitt
Published: 6th August 2015
Publisher: New American Library
Today brings my stop on the tour for
Rainy Day Sisters by Kate Hewitt and I have a wonderful guest post from Kate on Fact versus Fiction. Enjoy.
Fact Versus Fiction By Kate Hewitt
Plenty of people in my life have asked me how much of my stories are fact versus fiction. This has been especially true with my novels set in Cumbria, as I lived in Cumbria for four years, and the villages in my novel had a rather suspicious resemblance to my own quaint village. Naturally people started drawing conclusions, and many people assumed that all of the characters in my book were based completely on real people—and told me so, often with a wink and a grin.
The truth, however, is not as simple as sorting out what is fact and what is fiction. In fact, every novel I’ve written is, in essence and total, a work of fiction, but I draw on plenty of real life experience while I’m writing. In Rainy Day Sisters, Lucy’s initial experiences of Hartley-by-the-Sea are very similar to my own upon moving to West Cumbria, and her first interaction with a local farmer is taken directly from my life. In The Vicar’s Wife, the main character Jane’s children say the same thing my children said after the first day of school—there was chocolate pudding with chocolate sauce for lunch! And in The Lost Garden, the main character Marin uncovers and restores a walled garden just as I did.
And yet the story, the plot, the conflict, the characters, all are made up. I can’t imagine transposing a person in real life onto the page; to be honest, there wouldn’t be much fun in it. The characters I make up in my head are so real to me, and they soon start controlling their own destinies as best they can. Besides, fact is indeed stranger than fiction; many real-life events wouldn’t be believable in a novel.
Perhaps the most ‘real’ part of my novels is the emotion. No matter what character I’m writing, I have to get into their head. The emotions they feel have to be the ones I’ve felt at some point in my life, even if the circumstances are completely different.
So ultimately for me, when it comes to writing novels, I want the emotions to be the thing readers feel are the most realistic and true to life, and what they remember the best. The rest is, and always will be, fiction.
BIO
Kate Hewitt is the author of over 40 novels of women’s fiction and romance. She loves telling an emotional story in a variety of genres, and has been nominated for the Romance Writers of America RITA Award twice. An American ex-pat, she lives in the Cotswolds of England with her husband, five children, and an overly affectionate Golden Retriever. You can follow her adventures in village life on her blog, http://www.acumbrianlife.blogspot.co.uk.
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