Fictional Truth

May 12, 2014.

I'm sure anyone who writes fiction would agree, we take our best ideas from real-life experiences.  We may twist them around a bit, reshape them, color them with different names and places, even reverse their logic completely, but so much of what we write is based in fact.  I once shook Michael Jordan's hand, so I'll find a way to add that to one of my future books.

When I start writing a new book, as I'm in the process of doing now for my third book, I don't think about some fictional philosophy or concept.  I think about what my readers could grab hold of, and really believe.  Obviously the creative process is about creating, so I do enjoy manifesting new realities, people, and places as I write, but I find I'm always doing this from a place I already know.  My human experience has already been filled with a million different scenarios and realities, and my writing only adds more on top of that.

There's a blessing in this, as well as a curse.  You want your reader to understand what you're laying out for them, to feel comfortable with the sentences they're reading, but you also want to lift them up, far away from reality.  You want to play with their sense of true and false, to tinker with their remembrance of their real life, to help them forget about their problems for a while.  A great author needs to bring her readers deep into the book, so once they're thoroughly involved in the fictional world, they've forgotten they even have a life of their own.

The premise can certainly vary if you're not writing pure fiction, or if you want your subjects and stories to pull from real events.  For instance, I could write a story about the great blackout of 2003, about two young people who met in a stuck subway car.  I could tell you how after being trapped for seven hours, they escaped into the subway tunnel, hiked through Central Park, and washed themselves off in Bethesda Fountain.  We'd learn how they walked all the way down to the Brooklyn Bridge, and over to Brooklyn just as the sun was coming up.  I'd weave their story forward this way and that through the blackout and beyond, but because it's based in a real historical event, you might keep thinking the people are real, and their story really happened.

Fictional Truth can work this way, or a hundred ways like it.  And it can layer an author's real world too, whether or not he knows it.  In my life since I've been writing books about angels and demons, I can't help but see the very real possibility of some of my fictional events actually happening.  Maybe not some involving angels and demons, but certainly others which talk about real historical figures and places. 

My life has been filled with some pretty amazing events and stories, and I hope I can continue to share them with you more and more.  Some are reflected in my second book, The Papal Visitor, and plenty were in my first book too.  My fiction writing is colored by this life I've led.  It can't help but be affected by it constantly.  And in the same way, my fictional writing is affecting my real life!  It's coloring who I am and how I think.  Fact and fiction are allowed to dance together a bit at times, as long as we always know what is fiction and what is fact, and not believe everything someone tells us.  I never shook Michael Jordan's hand, for instance.