“A story is something you made up from something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was, you told it like you think it should have been.”
The Kind of Truth That Lives in Fiction
That quote has always stayed with me. It holds something quiet and powerful: fiction can tell the truest things, even when it bends the facts. We don’t write to repeat events—we write to reveal meaning. And sometimes, what should have been carries more weight than what was.
When I write about my village in Jamaica, I am not only telling you what happened. I am telling you what it felt like, what it meant. What lived in the hush of a grandmother’s eyes, in the rustling skirts of women who walked long distances to carry home the weight of their families. I tell it not with a reporter’s objectivity, but with a storyteller’s heart.
It Takes Longer to Tell the Truth
There’s a passage I return to again and again:
“It doesn’t take long to write about things you don’t know anything about. Writing about actual things takes longer, for you have to live them first.”
And so I take my time.
Writing about what I’ve lived through takes a kind of quiet courage. It means sitting again with the ache of a memory or the echo of a child’s cry in the hills. It means revisiting the fear that hung when a family secret floated close to the surface. It means honoring the ones who came before me—not just by naming them but by hearing them.
Village Lives, Carved in Silence
The women in my stories are often unnamed in the histories that shaped our island. Yet their lives were full of contradiction, beauty, and defiance. One sold freshly caught fish from the sea at the corner of the marketplace, humming gospel under her breath. Another nursed children not her own, her hands cracked from river water and soap. Another dared to love someone forbidden and paid a steep price in silence.
These women whispered to me before I ever picked up a pen.
They remind me that the heart of a story isn’t just the plot—it’s the pulse. The quiet truths underneath. The secrets we dress in fiction because that is the only way they can live and still breathe. Want to journey further into these stories? Subscribe at carol@carolguscott.com. Let’s tell the truth together—one tender word at a time.
