Writing ingredients: Life
A lot of fiction is written. Where does it come from?
When you write fiction, a lot of inspiration is necessary. You can’t possibly come up with every detail yourself from your head, you must have had some real life interactions or observations in order to create the bits and pieces that come together as a fictional story, right?
Whether you write fiction or non fiction, you are telling a story. You are transmitting a message, and by choosing fiction or not, you choose the medium you believe will be the most effective. Non fiction is often based upon real life experience, like things that have happened to us, things that have moved us, made us think, or tapped into one or more emotions.
Fiction is different. Now you are writing a story that you came up with, and use it as the basis to get your message across. But even though it is a story that did not exactly happen to you, or was no real life experience, chances are that most bits and pieces are actual real life experiences. If you write fiction, you have to construct your personalities, with all of their habits, faults and imperfections. Where do you get all of these little nuggets? In my case, when I write fiction, I take all kinds of details from different people I meet, see or hear or write about, and combine subsets of them to create a character.
This is a complicated process that mostly takes place in my head before it gets written, mostly because it first exists in my head, and than slowly evolves to become a *real* person, with weaknesses, strengths, faults and habits, making the character relatable. It is not easy, though, and I would never claim to be any good at it. It does make you think about people and why they are what they are, and in some cases, reflecting upon people’s behavior like this will help you to keep yourself from judging others. When you start to try and understand the reasons for behaviors, you may learn a thing or two about people and life in general. It is a beautiful thing. I truly respect fiction writers.
Often I see, hear or find something that triggers me to remember it as a possible piece of a character that is forming. The characters I come up with are actually a mixup of all kinds of things I notice while going through everyday life, and thinking about that I wonder if that is not exactly the same as real life? Aren’t we all constructed from little pieces, habits, curiosities, odd thoughts and emotions? So maybe, just maybe, fiction is not that fictional at all, in a certain way? Fiction might just resemble reality a little bit more than you’d expect…
