Fiction Mimics Real Life: Part 2

In Today's Journal

* My Quote of the Day
* Fiction Mimics Real Life: Part 2
* Took a Day Off
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

My Quote of the Day

"Fiction makes the indecipherable, the unbelievable, clear and real." Harvey

Fiction Mimics Real Life: Part 2

Before you read this, please read

• Fiction Mimics Real Life: Introduction and

• Fiction Mimics Real Life: Part 1

As to the Original Notion

that "Life can be unbelievable, but fiction has to make sense," I don't buy it.

Even unbelievable events in life make sense. The lack is in the context and in whether you want to believe it.

When you witness an event, you have only whatever context your physical and emotional senses are able to provide in the moment.

And of course, some events are so shocking or horrible you don't want to believe them. (You don't want to suspend your sense of disbelief. Ever heard that phrase before?)

But when you have all the facts and have had time to process them, even an unbelievable event makes sense. You might not LIKE the sense it makes, but it makes sense.

We can write 'unbelievable' fiction, too.

Again, many of us do that on a daily basis, and I'm not only talking about fantasies or science fiction.

The difference is, our fiction makes sense to the reader immediately because we give him all the facts:

• the character descriptions (to include facial expressions, body language, etc.) and

• the setting descriptions that cause the events to make sense.

• Both of those are as witnessed through the physical and emotional senses of the POV characters.

Again, when you see something happen in real life, it happens within a certain context. So the 'description' of the setting and characters depends on the individual who's watching as the event unfolds.

Studies have been conducted that prove different witnesses see, hear, smell, etc. different things when an event unfolds in real life.

In large part, the same is true of watching a fictional event unfold in a film. As we watch episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, my wife and I often notice different things in the setting and different things about the characters as a scene or event unfolds.

But the reader of the printed story doesn't have that problem. If 100 people read one of my stories or novels, each will have a different opinion of that story (and that's fine).

But each will have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt exactly the same things: whatever I put on the page.

And frankly, in my book (if you will pardon the pun), that makes we who write fiction very fortunate individuals.

Took a Day Off

Now there's something you don't see very often.

I wasn't feeling all that yesterday morning, so I took a day off. We went to an antique mall in another town to look around. It was different.

Of Interest

Lisa Hall-Wilson: Dive Into The Soul Of Storytelling With Deep Point Of View This is a helpful website. If you omit the occasional references to the myths, this writer has it right. I just added this link to four categories on my author website. It's that useful. (Caution: From what I can tell, Lisa has written only one novel. It is rare indeed that I recommend a site for instruction on writing by a novice novelist.)

WD's Self-Published Book Awards

The QWERTY Keyboard: Where Did It Come From?

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………… 570

Writing of Blackwell Ops 38: Paul Stone

Day 1…… 4071 words. To date…… 4071
Day 2…… 2711 words. To date…… 6782
Day 3…… 3434 words. To date…… 10216
Day 4…… 4185 words. To date…… 14401
Day 5…… 4149 words. To date…… 18550
Day 6…… 4104 words. To date…… 22654

Fiction for February………………….. 64476
Fiction for 2025………………………. 185831
Nonfiction for February…………….... 21950
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 53930
2025 consumable words…………….. 233251

Average Fiction WPD (February)…….. 2388
Average Fiction WPD (Annual)……..… 3203

2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 4
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 9
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..... 108
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 279
Short story collections……………………. 29

Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.

Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.