Why I Write About Real Life

I happen to have several talented friends who are writers. Almost all of them work within the realms of the make-believe, pounding out brilliant fiction for different destinations. Some are published. Some are not. Each of them is really, really good. Once upon a time, I thought I was supposed to be a member of their ranks.

Now, I realize I'm not.

I was reminded of this just this afternoon as I sat down to try and write the first bit of fiction I've attempted in months. I had a singular line in my head that I wanted to get down and see where it might lead. After a solid 45 minutes of typing and re-typing, I finally got the first line out and smiled.

It was good.

But first lines have never been my problem. Thinking of a lede (that's journalism talk for opening line or paragraph) is usually pretty easy for me, and normally they have a good hook to get the reader interested. In fact, I even won a contest in Writers Digest by penning a memorable first line, I'm so good. (All I won was a contributor's copy and my name in their pages, but hey - it was something!)

So I'm good at first lines. It's the second line that trips me up. And the third. And every line thereafter.

Which brings me back to this afternoon: I had a great first line, brimming with potential and couldn't think of a single thing to do with it. Instead, I sat there and thought about my kids, who've been sick the past few days, and how these moments together have been trying but worth it. I thought about Kris Parker and his family, and how they're doing without their Latvian family members. I thought about current events, the history of our town, the yuckiness of the weather, and the ever present turning of the clock.

A whole new world lay waiting for me in that first fictitious line, and all I could think about was the non-fictitious world I inhabit everyday.

There's no question which one fascinates me more.

The funny thing is, when I was in college and taking a "Writing for Publication" class, the pieces that my professor most identified with were my creative non-fiction stuff: movie and book reviews, profiles, random topical essays.

"You're good," he told me, rapping a knuckle against my portfolio for the semester. "You could get some of this stuff published right now."

I laughed at him. I wanted to publish novels, not little snippets of observational drivel. It was inside the vast pages of the Great American Novel that a writer to speak to the culture around him and take his turn as a shaper of minds, not in some dinky little 800 word essay buried in a New Yorker sidebar.

I wish I had listened to him.

Some people live with their minds populated by created characters. I happen to be one of them, but the characters that inhabit my mind were created by some One else. While my friends are able to invent new beings out of the stuff inside their heads, I'm not talented enough for that; I have to interpret the beings around me.

But I'll take it. I think it's more important for me to be able to speak plainly in my own voice about the world I live in than to borrow a character's voice to speak about a fictional world that's merely a shadow of this one. That's not to denegrate fiction - we need it, and we need it in abundance.

Just not from me.

The old maxim may be trite, but it's on point: sometimes truth is stranger than fiction - and it takes someone with talent to tell the truth.

Hopefully, I do that.

If not, I still have some really bad poetry left from college...