Musings

All writers have bits of themselves in their stories. It's just how things work. Every time they write a story, there's a part of them inside. How else would stories come to be? Neil Gaiman said it the best:


"Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, "So this is how it feels," and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own."


I completely agree with that quote because I've done it so many times. Something dramatic and tragic will happen and I'll already be thinking of how to phrase it correctly or where best to implement that event in my stories. It's such an incredibly true fact. How is one to write if one does not experience? The only way to write about life is to live it. All writers do is simply retell their own experiences in a disguised and magical and wonderful way, a way that delights us and makes us forget. They can provoke emotion because they have suffered the same. If you were to read a story and pay very close attention, you could catch glimpses of the writer's true life. That's the honest beauty of it.


"Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe."


To be able to copy down your life into these complex things called stories and have someone feel what you felt and be inspired as well; that's the true dream.


You might admire the way an author wrote a particular character. You might love how they were able to create such intricacies and depth for someone fictional, but then, if you looked around you, isn't everyone you meet the same? No one person has the same story behind what makes them who they are and that in itself automatically creates depth. I don't honestly think that you can truly know every aspect of a person...not in one lifetime. It takes an eternity to know someone inside and out, to know every aspect of their past, every flitting thought, every reason for quirks.


And, that, I suppose, is why it is increasingly difficult to replicate it in fiction. There is only a thinly veiled curtain between reality and imagination and fiction is a blend between the two worlds. In essence, it's entropy in its most beautiful form. It's us.