How Fiction Helped Me Understand Real Life

(Day 22 of 30 – story crumbs from the world of Loveandpizza.it 🍕)

I didn’t set out to understand my own life when I started writing Loveandpizza.it. I set out to write a love story set in Napoli. A story that would avenge my little sister and empower her after her heartbreak. That’s all. But somewhere in the drafting, the book started handing things back to me that I hadn’t put there on purpose.

Carolina arrived in Napoli not knowing the rules. Not the unspoken ones, anyway – the ones about how loudly you’re allowed to want something, how much of yourself you’re supposed to hide until it’s safe to show it. I gave her that because it was true of the city, and true of being a stranger in it. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to notice it was also true of me. I had also arrived in Napoli not knowing the rules. Recently married (one week!), starting a new life, in a new city, where I could only wing it in the language. To say that it was challenging is an understatement. Luckily that at least, like Carolina, I had a job. 

Fiction says the thing you couldn’t

There’s a kind of honesty available in a made-up story that isn’t available anywhere else. You can hand a feeling to a character and watch what she does with it, and somehow that tells you more than staring at the feeling yourself ever did.

I gave Carolina a homesickness I recognised. I gave her a habit of forgiving people faster than they’d earned it. I gave her Luca’s certainty, which looks like love and isn’t quite. None of that was clinical. I wasn’t diagnosing myself on the page. But writing her decisions, over and over, taught me things about my own that I hadn’t worked out any other way.

That’s the strange gift of fiction. It’s a side door. You go in to tell a story and you come out having understood something you’d been circling for years without ever looking at it straight on.

The city taught the character, and the character taught me

Napoli is loud about everything – love, hunger, joy, grief, all shouted from windows and balconies with no shame attached. I lived there without that permission. I guess I’d been raised, the way a lot of us are, to “keep the volume down”.

Writing a heroine who lived in that city and slowly, stubbornly, started living by its rules instead of mine was how I gave myself the permission I hadn’t been able to give directly. Carolina got to be loud before I did. She got to want things out loud, mess things up out loud, love badly and openly and get up again. I wrote her that way because Napoli demanded it of her. And then I noticed I’d started demanding a little of it from myself too.

That’s what nobody tells you about writing fiction seriously. You think you’re building a world for a reader, when half the time you’re actually building a door for yourself, and you don’t see it until you’re already through it.

Why I built a space for this

That side door is the whole reason The Writing Shed Club exists. Not as a place to learn craft rules, though you’ll pick some up. I created it as a place where women who love stories can sit down, write something true wrapped in something made-up, and see what it hands back to them.

It’s an intimate, warm and cosy corner of the internet. I host a few co-writing sessions every week if you want the company, or you can just find a prompt in one of the “rooms” if you’d rather work alone. 🤗 But, there’s no pressure, nor “perfect”.  Just the same thing that got Loveandpizza.it written in the first place (and a second novel in the works 🤩) – showing up, and letting the story tell you something you didn’t know you knew.

And yes – because I know you’ll ask 😉 – there is a real writing shed. It sits at the bottom of my garden, full of books and blankets and a desk that is never quite tidy, and it’s where a fair amount of this gets written, and where I join the club members to write together. The name isn’t a metaphor. It’s just where I work (and escape).

If any of this has been tugging at you while you’ve followed these thirty days, that’s your invitation. Grab your key to the Shed and come write with me!

Your turn: has a book, a film, a song – anything made-up – ever told you something true about your own life that you hadn’t seen coming? I’d love to know what it was. 👇

Dani. x

New to the Loveandpizza.it world? Start here: https://danielapescuma.com/category/loveandpizza-it/

P.S. Loveandpizza.it is coming back in English, Italian and Portuguese. Save your slice and you’ll be first to know the moment your edition’s ready. 🍕