From Fact to Fiction...

As authors, we draw on our personal history and past experience in creating a novel...
But how should we manage that transition when the facts directly inspire the fiction?

For me, that shift was especially important in my first novel, The Housemaid's Daughter. It told the fictional story of Ada, housemaid to an Irish immigrant family in South Africa, and how her life unfolded beside theirs. 

The facts that lay behind the story came from my own family history. More than a century ago, my maternal grandparents did, indeed, migrate from Ireland to Cradock, a small town in the Karoo semi-desert region. This happened because my grandfather was offered a job to open a branch of Cuthbert's shoe stores there. As a child, I was captivated by my grandmother's recollections, but I never imagined they would become the quiet impetus for the novel many years later. 

Yet, once you are committed, how to turn those real life memories into fiction? The first step, I have found, lies in research. You need an authentic, historical framework in which to place your story - a framework which might, incidentally, also offer plot lines you may not have envisaged. The next challenge involves taking those real memories and converting them into a story that goes beyond personal recollection and protects historical identities. And that was how Ada, the heroine, was born. Alongside her, my now-fictional Irish family develop their own characteristics independently.  
But, I confess, there were tiny snippets of reality that I included.
Fictional Irish matriarch, Cath, is a music teacher, as was my grandmother. 
And, poignantly, Cath's son, Phil, fights at the Battle of Sidi Rezegh in North Africa during the second World War. My real-life uncle did so, and sadly died. 
Phil, however, survives, and that's part of the story...