The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: real life

  • Writers Are Thieves

    I'm in yur lifes, stealin' yur wurdz.

    Nothing anyone says is safe in my house. Not only do we have two writers, we also have a teenage daughter who will take the most offhand remark, laugh maniacally, then immediately post it without explanation or context on her Facebook page. (The Boy is pretty safe. He’s a musician and deals more with musical notes and philosophical truths. He rarely updates his FB status.) The Girl, however, has a flair for sharing the ridiculous.

    She gets that from me, unfortunately.

    I like a good challenge. Some are self-inflicted, and some come directly from others. Sometimes a piece of real-life dialogue is so silly, it begs for a new context. In Monster in My Closet, there were two separate lines I had to find a use for: “My bread fell asleep in the toaster” and “The problem is, you’ve got to have movie-time attitude.” They made little sense in real-life when they were spoken, but inserting them into a story? Challenge accepted.

    I also like to drop inside jokes into the manuscript, just to make my husband laugh. I never expect them to make it through edits, but so far, I’ve managed a Ghostbusters and a Raiders of the Lost Ark reference that made it all the way to the galley stage, so they’re permanent.

    In Pooka in My Pantry, in honor of my best friend from childhood (who’s also my hardest critiquer), and also in honor of our fourth-grade teacher, I dropped in a little scene about a mess in a girls bathroom—one which I recreated from something she and another girl actually did. It was epic and included yogurt and a peanut butter sandwich. I felt it needed to be immortalized, even if it was only a few sentences in a short conversation in the book.

    As someone who’s known me longer than any other non-family member, she also picked out my dislike of goats from a zoo scene. Zoey’s flashback was a real childhood event wherein a goat in a petting zoo tried to eat my dress and scared the hell out of me.

    And while we’re talking about it, Zoey herself is more like me than I’d like to admit. Everybody who reads the books tells me she’s me. Well, no, she’s not. Not intentionally. But when people at a checkout counter stop her and tell her their life stories with no prompting whatsoever—yeah. That’s me. It happens every time I leave the damn house. Hell, it happens when I don’t leave the house. My son laughed when the pizza guy (with no prompting from me, I swear) started rambling on about his problems. Hand to God, I even had a shrink do it once while I was sitting in his office.

    So, yeah. Real life goes into what I write.

    I guess that’s what they mean by “Write what you know.”

  • Saravision

    One of my dearest writing friends, Jack Campbell, Jr., told me once that there is nothing fictional about fiction. “Fiction is just a distortion of our dreams and nightmares.” Every plot, every character, every snippet of dialog contains a part of me. If you were to dissect everything I had ever written and put it all together, you would know me better than my closest friends and family who haven’t ever read any of my work. Especially if you were a writer.

    Writers understand what goes into writing. We understand each other on a level our normal friends and family never could. They see us in our day to day lives, in a real life setting, making the most out of the lives we are given, while other writers can see the world how we envision it by looking at what we’ve created. They can interpret what is hidden deep within our subconscious mind. Zero drafts in particular are the most telling – they are almost flow of consciousness style writing, seen before the author has a chance to edit or censor their thoughts.

    There really aren’t new ideas as far as stories. Everything has been done. The difference is every single one of us has a different view of the world. Our backgrounds shape who we are which in turn shapes how we write or even what we write about. Only I can tell a story a certain way. It is my point of view that makes it unique. A cliché might be cliché, but my particular spin on it makes it somewhat new and different.

    Everything in my life has crept into my writing. My hopes and dreams, as Jack said. My bitterness, my pain, my happiness, my sense of humor. The people I know, the conversations I’ve had. My writing is an amalgamation of everything I’ve read or watched or listened to chewed up and spat back out. It’s the world seen through my particular rose-colored glasses. When you read something I’ve written, you put on my glasses and see the world in the particular tint that I see it.

    Saravision.

    It may not always be obvious, but what I write is me. Distorted, translucent, inverted or twisted, substituted or hyperbolic. Everything I write is a seed taken from something of myself and cultivated into something somewhat recognizable, if you know what to look for.

  • You wouldn’t know me from my writing

    Palm trees and an ocean view
    I prefer to write about places I know well. Someday, all of my stories will be set here.

    For years, I heard my writing teachers telling me to put more of my own experiences into my writing. I’ll be honest with you, though. My life was pretty boring. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to read about me.

    I don’t like writing about real life. I prefer the odd, the strange, and the fantastic. I’m more at home talking about people with superpowers than work, relationships, or my efforts to catalog my DVD library.

    But here and there, my real life has started slipping into my writing. A woman in my short story reminds me of my wife. And the banter she shares with the protagonist is reminiscent of the way my wife and I finish one another’s thoughts.

    Other characters, too, reflect certain aspects of people I know: an old friend, a mentor, or an obnoxious guy at work. Of course, I have to do something to make them interesting. So sometimes that guy in my office turns out to be a tasty snack for a demon or an early casualty in an alien invasion.

    Mostly, though, it’s settings that I steal from real life.

    I’m no good at imagining cities I have never lived in. I couldn’t write a hard-boiled detective noir set in 1950s L.A. I can’t write about New York City. I’ve tried writing about Florida, but it’s been 20 years since I lived there. I’m sure it’s changed a bit.

    The only reason I set my current novel in Chicago is because I’ve actually visited there recently. Well, that and the fact that I destroyed half the city before the story began. The streets of “New Chicago” don’t have to bear a strong resemblance to what exists there now. I have kept a few of the neighborhood names, and some landmarks. But I had to spend hours pouring over Google Maps and  Wikipedia pages to make sure I managed to get those details right.

    For now, I’ll stick with people and places I know, even if I have to change them up a bit to make them more interesting.

    As Jimmy Buffett once sang:

    “Don’t try to describe the ocean if you’ve never seen it.
    Don’t ever forget that you just may wind up being wrong.”

  • Real Life and Writing (Week of 16 April 2012)

    It’s rare that a writer’s only job is to write stories for our entertainment. Certainly the big names do, and several mid-list authors are able to make that leap into being a full-time writer. We baristas here at the Cafe are writers, but we have other occupations, too. One of the benefits to working out in the ‘real’ world is being able to populate our stories with things that we observe out there.

    That can scare our friends. No one wants their foibles put on display for strangers to see. Unless of course they’re on a cell phone and telling their BFF all about what they did last night. You wouldn’t believe some of the conversations we overhear when the customers think no one’s listening. Or maybe you would.

    This week, our bloggers are answering the question “How has your ‘real’ life crept into your writing? Is there anyone you know in them there words?” No really, that’s how the question was asked. Anyway, tune in every day to see what we have to say about it. Maybe you’ll come to understand that not everyone we meet is a good character though bits of you might get in there. We promise it’ll be enlightening and you could possibly see some of yourself in there.

    If you look hard enough.

    Have a cup of coffee, or tea. Read up on how we writers change things to suit ourselves.