Can't Make This Up

One of the last times my father drove, he was already legally blind, and insisted on taking his car to the Chrysler dealership to get some work done while he was staying here. He was following my van, which was being driven by my Significant Other while my mom and I were at home sipping morning coffee.

At 8:30 a.m., the two of them not gone ten minutes, I got a panicked cellphone call that my Significant Other had somehow "lost" my dad and his van. On I-95. One minute he was in the rear-view mirror, and the next . . . he wasn't. I screamed, "This is NOT the kind of call I like to get at 8:30 in the morning, that you have LOST MY BLIND FATHER as he is DRIVING . . . I don't even know if he knows how to operate his cellphone. AND HE HATES THE HIGHWAY! FIND HIM!"

I had visions of trying to explain this all to the police, and some sort of alert/APB going on on the morning news. "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?"

About twenty minutes later, I got another call. My Significant Other was hyperventilating. "Did you FIND HIM?" I asked, assuming the hyperventilating was the sight of my dad in a ditch.

"Yeah, I found him all right. He just threatened to murder me. For real. With his bare hands. In the parking lot of the dealership."

"He'll calm down."

"I don't think so. I think I saw him look for the tire iron."

Now, ordinarily, I presume, "I ought to murder you right now," might seem--to some--one of those vague threats. Suffice it to say, we don't take those threats lightly in my household.

But then again . . . I can't make this stuff up. I can't make up the time one of my dad's friends lovingly drew me to the side at a party and offered a free "hit" on someone I was not getting along with at the time, and how "easy" it would be to make it look like an accident. "Look, if you don't want the person DEAD, two broken kneecaps will put them out of commission for a while."

Indeed.

Now, I presume as FICTION writers . . . we make up most of what is in our books, tainted with truth here or there. You need a good imagination. But I also know that the most "colorful" aspects of my life have certainly helped my fiction along.

So in the "I can't make this up" category, a week from tomorrow, my dad moves in. He has decided to make this a permanent move. As in forever, or until one of us dies. Which could be me.

And so, I have NO doubt that this will most hilariously become a book. May the people of Richmond guard their salt and pepper shakers and cutlery (he's partial to stealing salt and pepper shakers) . . .

So come on. 'Fess up. On this beautiful (where I am), crisp Monday . . . what from YOUR real life trickles into your fiction? What can't you make up?

Reality Bites

Last night, I talked to a dear friend, and because she and I did not live near each other for many years (though now we do and I will see her Friday), I had never really told her the story of some of the toxic familial relations on three of my kids' father's side. As I recounted what was said to me, what was emailed to me, what was DONE to my children and so on, it really sounded like a cariacture. If I WROTE a family situation like my poor children have with their father's family, no one would believe it.

I am editing a book--nonfiction. And I have my suspicions that one particularly toxic story is very much true. The details ring so "real" in some ways, that I don't believe it has been fictionalized for the purposes of telling a story to illustrate a point. But I wrote the author and said, "I think you have to change this . . . no one would believe it." NOT because I don't believe it . . . but because it's so toxic as to border on madness.

I read a PW review of a book this morning in which the reviewer said the characters "bordered on parody." I have read the book and found the characters charming.

That's the tricky thing with fiction. I have gotten into more mild arguments with critique partners, my editors, myself (nothing like arguing with yourself) over motivations and characters and so on . . . on this and this alone. The believability issue.

I think newer writers find this particularly galling. In other words, we ALL know people capabale of being yes, THAT horrid, and yes, THAT eccentric. But put them in a fictional world and it starts to stretch readers' minds as far as believability.

Now here's the other side. I have written about people who dismember family members and about mob princesses and bookies and realms that most people don't know too much about. Somehow, if you set the world up just right . . . that's okay. Readers believe it. Why?

Banality.

I have come to the conclusion watching the behaviors of people who are really just ugly at times . . . that many people's cruelties are banal. As if they are blithely unaware they are rude or mean. Do I REALLY think the snarky woman who finds a way to insult to me at cocktail parties has nothing better to do than think of insults on my mothering skills? If I repeated to her what she said now, months after the fact, she would likely say, "I never said that." Or . . . "I must have been kidding." Or, like the lady who moved out of the neighborhood, I have a sneaking suspicion that excuse would be, "I must have been drunk." Some people's cruelties are completely banal. They don't even think about them. They don't lose sleep. They just wander through life that way.

But in a fictional world, writers set up REASONS for dismemberment and cruelty. We very often even give serial killers motivations of some sort (look what Thomas Harris did when he RUINED the Hannibal Lechter franchise). Give reasons . . . and people will BELIEVE your fiction.

But real life? A lot more banal.

Thoughts? Have you ever realized you simply couldn't use perfectly good "material" because no one would believe it? And what do you think about the banality of real-life versus fictional life?

Stranger Than Fiction

I once had a book rejected because an editor didn't "believe" that the people in my main character's life would "put up with her."

Which makes me laugh.

Because every day, just about, something happens to me, or to someone I know, that causes me to say, "If I wrote about this, no one would believe it."

And characters? Try a blind father--WITH a handicapped parking permit dangling from my rearview mirror--stating he is "pretty confident" he "could drive in limited situations." Like what? A straightline to my mailbox from the driveway?

Or the editor who found my character intolerable? I can think of countless toxic people I have met in my lifetime--all of whom had spouses and families who apparently put up with them.

I really do find it funny.

So tell me, what is the strangest real-life situation you know of, that you absolutely, positively know wouldn't be believed if you put it in your fiction. And have you ever had a rejection that cited something like that . . . and made you laugh a little bit?

More On Why I Write

"The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense."

~~Tom Clancy

I can't make sense of this. I can't make sense of this. Or this.

In fact, as a thinking person, there's a great deal of the world that makes no sense to me. When there is such abundance . . . why are people hungry? Why do people turn a blind eye to genocide, to poverty, to the unscrupulous nature of arms dealing, to . . . the list is neverending.

And so I like Clancy's quote. In a world that is, to my way of thinking, usually without sense, without reason, the world of fiction struggles to make sense of it.

We usually like our fiction to end with the good guys winning. With the world being saved. With the bad guys being robbed, a la Robin Hood. We like the mob to be brought down by the forces of its own greed and corruption. We want the real guilty guy tried and convicted and the innocent man on Death Row to be freed. We know that most of the time, things don't work out in reality. We know justice isn't blind. We know that people of peace--in Tibet or elsewhere--are often trampled by the people with the biggest tanks. We know landmines remain that take the limbs of innocents.

So fiction is a place to explore that and change the rules so it works out the way we want. At least for me.

I think that's sometimes why I write.

Thoughts?