In Stephen King’s story “The Body,” the character of Gordon LaChance uses his “real life experiences” as a taking-off point for the fiction he writes, but he reshapes enough of the content to satisfy his creative urges. The act of fictionalizing experiences that presented challenges or obstacles when he was younger empowers him to transcend those limitations. Because Gordon is the narrator of this story, the reader is blocked from finding out how much, if any, of the material he is presenting actually occurred. Furthermore, the other three men with whom he shared the boyhood experience are already dead and thus could not contradict him.

King seems to imply that works of fiction cannot simply be inspired by lived experience, but must inevitably transform it in significant ways. To some extent, that transformation may liberate the author, who can eliminate painful memories or portray their own actions in more positive, even heroic terms. The other side of fiction’s transformative potential is that it relies on invention and thus may represent the writer’s inability to honestly confront their past.