Fictionalizing the Past for a Better Future

Father Daughter Dialogue in Screenplay Talks About Alcoholism in a Way that Real Life Couldn’t

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”

— Virginia Woolf

Fiction is funny.

Writing it can help us get to the truth a whole lot faster. It can also help with healing and help pave the way for a better future.

There are many lessons to be learned from our personal past.

But sometimes it helps to treat the real-life people in our lives — past and present — as characters in a story to learn those lessons…then apply them to our lives, in a way that sticks.

Case in point is a scene from a screenplay of mine, entitled “The Pooh Stone.”

The following scene takes place three months after the death of my husband, “Sam.” I am “Alex.” In real life, we were both thirty-two when he died. The “Alex’s Dad” character is based on my dad. This conversation didn’t happen exactly this way in real life. But snippets of it did.

Here is the scene…

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