There’s this card on my fridge that says: Life is infinitely stranger than anything the mind could invent…, which is a sort of paraphrased quote from A Case of Identity by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (If you’ve not read it, you can see the whole quote here @ goodreads, if interested.) Reenie sent me the card with a present once, and I kept it for obvious reasons.
I spend a lot of time trying to come up with something that might be original, but it’s not really possible. I’m at my most inspired-feeling when flooding my brain with information about reality. Neil Gaiman said at the National Book Fair that “you don’t exist in a vacuum”, and I think pretending you do is not only pretentious, but sounds super boring. Real life is weird as hell (Or we could quote Mark Twain, too: the truth is stranger than fiction), and what’s the point of fiction that has no relevance to it?
The place I notice reality’s strangest effects on fiction is in the characters. In order for their more eccentric points to be accepted, or for the screwed-up ones to elicit any kind of empathy, it’s generally accepted that it’s good for them to have something real and honest about them. If one thing is believable, as many wise people have told me, the rest of their madness can be taken at our word.
Dexter might be a goddamn serial killer, but he’s OCD and loves kids. I so get him.
I’m not advocating characters who are like us, of course. No one wants to see Mary Sue and Gary Stu front and center –well, no one over the age of 12– and that’s the inevitable end of that path. But I think you know what I mean. I’m just talking about keeping it, er, real. Yeah.
But I notice that sometimes when I draw some characteristic I’ve observed in a real person into a fictional character, it can be less believable than the shit I made up. Which brings me back around to the initial Doyle quote– albeit after much pointless circling, as usual. People are so unbelievably weird. I know it’s not cool to directly transfer another human being into your fiction (though it’s all right with permission– my brother loves the fact that he has his own vampire), but we all steal bits and pieces; sometimes subconsciously, for me, mostly blatantly. But the most extreme characteristics we see every day– drama whoring, self-destructive addiction, selfishness on a grand scale– are strangely hard to buy, even for those who possess them. I have vampires, werewolves, telepaths, energy manipulators, a prostitute zombie, and pseudo-Polynesian not-elves… and I feel like I work ten times harder to make my real characters believable.
Reality is kind of awesome, even if I try and avoid it as often as possible. I like to remind myself of that sometimes.
Okay, so is that really cracky of me, or am I not the only one out there who’s experienced this? What kind of things have you dragged into your fiction from reality and found surprisingly unbelievable?
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