Reality is stranger than fiction...

Alright, so I haven’t blogged in a while. And I apologize to all of my readers out there…but as any true geek knows, it’s never too late to bust out a handy phoenix down to bring life back to that which has been slain and cold for quite some time.

Since my last post, I’ve published two novels (“World Train: Beginning” & “Snapshots to Bliss”) and instructed countless students on the basics, struggles, and eventual successes in writing. One of the most common questions I get as an author is: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ The simple answer would be: from the world around me – but simply put…the simple answer is shallow and stupid. When an author is asked that question, he or she should know that the person asking the question wants something more than that. They want a revelation – they want something magical and inspiring…something that convinces them that they can be the next Stephen King or JK Rowling themselves. But what the person asking the question doesn’t realize is that the trick in being a “good” writer comes in realizing that the real world in which we live in every day is far more bizarre and far-fetched than the ogres, spaceships, wizards, vampires, and werewolves that we read about in the world of books.

This past spring, I discovered that my significant other had been living these different lives for the majority of our 10-year relationship. She had at least six rectified (sorry, terrible pun there :p) affairs of five or more months behind my back and countless one night stands to be sure. She got other men to divorce their wives for her and then left them. She made promises to not only me but of course to all the other guys she was sleeping with. She covered everything up with lies upon lies. The way the mutual therapist we had both been seeing explained it to me was that she suffered from multiple personality disorder due to the inability to understand her true identity. She would put on these different “masks” (if you will) around different people and in different situations. It was hard to hear, but the therapist explained that I had fallen in love with a mask, and not a person. I’ve been generous in describing the situation, leaving out all of the confessions she made, the money she stole, the pregnancies she aborted, and of course the way it all went down, but there’s a reason I bring all of this up. While going through the initial shock of it all, one of my good friends reminded me that ‘truth is always stranger than fiction’. And my friend is absolutely right. You can turn on the news almost every day and wonder how certain things can happen in the world, or how certain people could even think of doing such things. You can wonder all day where the wiring in someone’s brain went funny, but it’ll never change the fact of what they did regardless of how little sense it seems to make. In fiction – while it is a medium that is completely fabricated – a writer needs to be aware of the line between believability and the mere ridiculousness that will turn their readers off. Is this line in a different place for different writers? Sure, I think it would be silly to argue that it wasn’t. The more one works within the realm of fiction, the further out that line gets. But the important thing to remember as a writer, is that there is a line somewhere in fiction that stops far before the reality of the world in which we live. I know, I know…most of the writers out there (especially young writers) wouldn’t hesitate to challenge this. It’s an easy argument to make: ‘because you can make up whatever you want in fiction, one can go way beyond the limitations of reality’. True, buuuuuuuut…as strange as it sounds, the fiction you write – even if it has wyverns and warlocks – has to still be believable to that line. In reality, we are always faced with thoughts, events, and situations that will never make any sense to us regardless of how much we try to think about them. We are forced to accept the bizarre things that happen in the world around us because we know it is reality. However, we are not forced to accept the bizarre things that happen in a fictional world, and that’s where a lot of young writers fail. They put together something they feel is a masterpiece, yet they lose their readers and they wonder why. They begin to question if they are even a good writer or not, and to be honest, I’ve worked with wonderful writers – writers abundant with talent. Most times with fiction, it doesn’t have anything to do with whether you write well or not, it has to do with this issue of believability – this imaginary line in our craft.

So hopefully this gives you a little more insight to the generic author answer for getting their ideas from the world around them. It’s counterintuitive, but understanding that the boundaries are far greater in reality than they are in fiction is a very important step for any aspiring writer to make.