Fiction is Fact

One question writers get asked a lot is “How did you create your characters?” or ”How did you think of your story?” I think the people who ask these questions believe that writers actually sit down and write an outline of their entire story/characters and decide every last detail completely logically. I think these people are naive. Say I have a character named Paul Wrigley. Most likely I did not create Paul’s appearance and persona from thin air. Most likely I was starting my story and, when I needed a character, one already halfway complete popped into my head. There is little logical about writing. Characters are not formed— characters burst from seemingly nowhere and are often already complete. Stories are not (should not be) logically formulated— they should come to you, practically leap out of you onto paper and take you away with them as they are written. I think any good writer will know what I am talking about.

I am not even sure that “create” or “invent” or “design” are legitimate descriptions of the process of writing. These words imply that the author sat down and crafted their characters and story bit by bit, like a carpenter might put together a house. Most often, however, authors are not even sure what they are going to write next. It is not something that you plan out word for word but rather something that comes to you. Furthermore, I do not believe you can create or invent something which is already in existence. More on that later.

The real question, then, is: “Where do these stories and characters come from?” It’s an interesting question if only you think of it the right way. Consider the universe. Even the slightest action can irrevocably alter it. Say 2000 years ago a frog ate a mosquito. Well, since that mosquito died, it was not able to reproduce, meaning that its children could not reproduce nor its children’s children and so on and so forth. Even the death of one puny mosquito 2000 years past could have prevented the birth of possible trillions of mosquitoes. One little action can have great implications in the future, no matter how insignificant it seems in the present. Now imagine that there are an infinite amount of universes where that same mosquito was either killed, lived, flew into a Venus flytrap, got caught in tree resin, was smashed by a human, drank the blood of a human, drank the blood of a cow, spread malaria…. the list goes on into infinity. There is a different universe completely the same as our own except for the actions of that one mosquito. Now imagine there is a universe for all the possible actions of every single mosquito and there are universes not only for the variables of mosquitoes but for the actions of humans and animals and plants and amoebas and the stars and planets. That is a lot of universes. In fact, it is an infinite number. Everything you can possibly imagine and more exists within these alternate universes. In some, only one thing minute or major is changed from our own. In others, every single thing is different. If you think of it this way, everything ever imagined exists in an alternate universe.

So, getting back to where stories come from. My theory is that the origin of these characters and stories are from alternate universes themselves. It is not such an outlandish idea. Now I’m not saying that some kind of ancestral memory that links us to the universes simply provides these ideas for us. No. What I am saying is that reality is wider than what we imagine it to be. These characters and stories we “invent” existed before we ever thought of them in their own alternate universes. Therefore, we have not really created or invented anything, only discovered something which already was in existence. “Fiction” is not in fact fictitious, simply fact from an alternate reality. Because it is not of our own reality, we label it as fiction, but it is actually fact from a separate universe.

So the next time some one calls you a rude name, don’t get angry: in some alternate universe you’re kicking their ass