Inspiration from life - a Catch-22 for writers
I was talking to an old friend last night on the phone, and we got onto the subject of "the good 'ol days," which in our case, was the years when we worked together at this company that shall remain nameless and all the crazy people we knew there, and I happened to mention how those people and events shaped my first book, Being John Bland.
As writers, we all drop that obligatory notice on our copyright pages about names, characters, places and incidents not being based on fact, but the truth is, everything we write is in some way, shape, or form at least partially based on or colored by our own experiences in life; i.e., facts.
When I started to write, I remember people always told me, "Write what you know." But the truth is, we're not supposed to actually do that, because that flies in the face of our copyright statement and thus opens us up to lawsuits, liable, and all other sorts of other undesirable outcomes. So what, exactly does that mean? How are we supposed to write what we know if we can't base our writing on actual people, places, or events?
I don't have an answer here...just spitballing, basically. It's one of those hypothetical chicken-and-egg scenarios that fly by and stick to your brain in the middle of the night, sort of like "Why did they call a chair 'chair?' Why not some other collection of random vowels and consonants? After all, they were creating a language."
Maybe normal people don't think like that. I have ridiculous questions like that pop up into my head all the time. Though, to be honest, I've never really considered myself to be normal, whatever that is. The problem is, like a dreaded song that gets stuck in your head for days on end (it's usually one you can't stand, like for me, "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights"), once one of these questions finds a host and takes hold, you can't shake it until you come up with some semblance of an answer that satisfies that sadistic little accountant in your brain that tries to file random data in its proper pigeonhole.
And I may be digging myself deeper into rather than out of the hole. I think I'll just go back to writing now. Thanks for listening--blogging is way cheaper than therapy.
As writers, we all drop that obligatory notice on our copyright pages about names, characters, places and incidents not being based on fact, but the truth is, everything we write is in some way, shape, or form at least partially based on or colored by our own experiences in life; i.e., facts.
When I started to write, I remember people always told me, "Write what you know." But the truth is, we're not supposed to actually do that, because that flies in the face of our copyright statement and thus opens us up to lawsuits, liable, and all other sorts of other undesirable outcomes. So what, exactly does that mean? How are we supposed to write what we know if we can't base our writing on actual people, places, or events?
I don't have an answer here...just spitballing, basically. It's one of those hypothetical chicken-and-egg scenarios that fly by and stick to your brain in the middle of the night, sort of like "Why did they call a chair 'chair?' Why not some other collection of random vowels and consonants? After all, they were creating a language."
Maybe normal people don't think like that. I have ridiculous questions like that pop up into my head all the time. Though, to be honest, I've never really considered myself to be normal, whatever that is. The problem is, like a dreaded song that gets stuck in your head for days on end (it's usually one you can't stand, like for me, "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights"), once one of these questions finds a host and takes hold, you can't shake it until you come up with some semblance of an answer that satisfies that sadistic little accountant in your brain that tries to file random data in its proper pigeonhole.
And I may be digging myself deeper into rather than out of the hole. I think I'll just go back to writing now. Thanks for listening--blogging is way cheaper than therapy.
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