Life in Paper

Writing is the art of putting life on paper. Even in the

fantasy genre that I write, it is all about real life and reality. Fantasy gives us the luxury of distance along with the sense of grand adventure. When a society creates a great ill we can see how it is reflected in our own and the bitter pill goes down easier because it has been sliced into morsels across a society that is alien and fictitious. I think that is part of why we have fantasy so that we can learn from it how to tackle the ugly parts of life we would otherwise shy away from.

I started my first stories because I wanted to draw and I

figured the drawings should have captions, and those captions should mean something, become something. That phase quickly turned into writing and drawing becoming separate ventures. Realistically, I am far better at writing than at drawing. However, my early stories became explorations. I created worlds with characters and situations scarier than what I was dealing with so I could be less afraid. When problems came up, I crafted stories to dissect those problems into manageable pieces. Story was how I processed life. How many of you out there are any different? Sure, maybe you only read them, absorbing them through ears and eyes, but if you sit back with the question, do you find it is true?

This isn’t even a notion that comes to be from

happenstance. It is the natural flow of story if you look into the histories of oral traditions and written literature alike. If any of you have taken a writing class the teacher probably spent time talking about character construction and the interaction between that and plot. Characters are meant to be designed like real people so they can feel real. The plot is meant to challenge the characters in a way that forces them to confront and fight through their weaknesses. Their values and wants get challenged and they have to make hard choices, just like us. By watching them and their choices we evaluate their actions and weigh what is good and bad, what is forgivable and unforgivable. What few of us realize is that as we are making those evaluations they are becoming choices for ourselves. This is why it matters when we excuse the book boyfriend of mass crimes because he is a hot sad boy. We are internalizing those excuses for our own actions and those around us. It is not a quick moving or hugely noticeable change, but it builds a pattern over time until it becomes reality. Information consumption is never passive. This is why some stories and some heroes matter more to us too.

The characters that have wounds and weaknesses like ours

earn the strongest reactions from us. Characters are even specifically constructed that way. It is what makes them real. I have this one book I read called The Psychology Workbook for Writers: Tools for Creating Realistic Characters and Conflict in Fiction by Darian Smith that breaks down so many aspects of constructing the mental field of a character. As Smith explains in the book, understanding psychology is an important part in the writing process. This is another place where writing and teaching overlap. Psychology is a required part of obtaining a teaching degree. Both in showing up for students and crafting meaningful characters it is important to learn about the different ways people think and what contributes to those patterns.

Let me give you a real life example and a character

example so you can see the overlap. One of the categories Smith goes over in the book are messages received in childhood as internal do’s and don’ts. They affect how a person behaves when they get older even without them noticing it. Real life example; upon some recent self reflection I realized that an internal don’t I have is “don’t be inconvenient.” This translates into more don’ts; don’t struggle, don’t be noticeable, etc. I can point to where the message came from and it is a situation outside my family that I forgave a long time ago, but I realized that I am still operating like I have to live inside that broken framework. My health has been a struggle in all the ways that might be imagined, but an additional layer causing mental strain is that it flies in the face of those don’ts. I don’t have the option to not be inconvenient. Sometimes my symptoms are very noticeable, that’s inconvenient. The people who love me are worrying about how I am doing and what this development means for my life, struggling. I can’t help, do, or participate in activities the way that I used to, inconvenient. I have talked about my faith before, and what brought about this realization was in the middle of a reflection on my faith and where I am at. I firmly believe that God can use me well or sick. There is too long of a track record of Him doing just that for me to wonder if there can’t be purpose in this season. One way God can be using this time is to help me learn some things that I needed to learn ages ago, to rely on others without guilt, to have empathy for circumstances I can’t understand, and to break frameworks I lived by that do not serve me. This is real life, but I am sure some of you easily see how characters in stories have dealt with similar things.

A fiction example from my work is in the novel I am

querying. The main character is a character who only found purpose in life by being of use to others. What happens when that is taken away? From personal experience I can say nonclinical depression and floundering while trying to find a new anchor. That is what he has failed to find. At the end of his rope he is left with the question about what is the point to living when what gave him purpose is not attainable and everything about how he has to live is a struggle. His journey is breaking those old frames and forming new ones. It may sound like a negative variety of Mary Sue, but the ironic part is I wrote his story before my health issues. He went ahead of me, and it has been a blessing because I am able to make some better choices than he did. I based his experiences on some I had in my teen years of feeling rudderless and circumstances I had seen in others that I wished I could help heal. Too bad we can't just write a couple hundred pages to get people in real life to a healthier place. In real life the process is slower and more nuanced. However, anyone who has been in my position or something like his will find reality starkly reflected.

A book club did me the honor of being my final line of

feedback before final edits to start my query process. Each of them had different aspects of the story they enjoyed most, but their feedback on the main character was that he felt real. They didn’t always agree or like his choices, but they could see why he made them. That is great. I don’t want people to make all the same types of choices he did. He moved out of his brokenness with such a shattered sense of hope that he took risks he didn’t need to and pushed away the things meant to heal him. How many of us have been in the same place or done the same thing?

Fantasy stories help us to explore the world we know

through one we don’t because it is safer that way. Fiction is not true stories but they are always about the truth, how it is lived, what can be learned, how it is twisted, and how it can be put right. Characters are us, but a little different just enough to be their own person but not so much that we don’t see the mirror held to our faces. It is beautiful. It is ugly. It is fraught with the grey we live in inbetween all that is clear and all that is obscured. Writing is the art of putting life on paper, and isn’t it amazing to be a part of it?