Writing a novel based, even in part, on true events or real people is a very tricky affair.  If a novel is based on facts, the facts are never good enough as they stand, simply because the motives behind the acts that made the facts rarely make sense, at least to rational people. And the people who made the decisions, whether spontaneous or premeditated, that brought those facts into being can get really upset if they suspect they might have proved a role model for a character in a book.

Of course, every person in the world could suspect themselves as a role model for some novel’s character, given, A) the number of people in the world, and, B) the number of novels published, especially today.  Somebody somewhere will, should they read the right novel, identify themselves as a character portrayed.  The trick for the author is to make sure that notes and records are kept, their clippings, their research, and their resources well-documented, whether their novel characters are, in fact, based on a real set of incidents and real people, then modified to fit a completely fictitious story, or whether the entire novel is a completely fictitious creation. That way, if someone somewhere reads the novel and decides, “Hey, that’s me,” the author can prove that, “No, that isn’t you.  This story used no facts at all, and was complete fabrication, and here’s my drafts, outlines, and plot maps to prove it,” or “the facts and incidents came from these newspaper stories, these psychological profiles, a framework based on completely contrived posits jotted by me in a plot scheme here, and work-throughs conceived after a critique or brain-storming session here.”

“But that’s me in that news article,” sputters the accuser (in the case where the author used real life incidents rather than complete fabrication).

“But this isn’t you in this news article, is it?” responds said author.

ACCUSER: “No.”

AUTHOR: “And this one?”

ACCUSER: “No.”

AUTHOR: “And what about these?” (Author waves another thirteen articles in front of the accuser.)

ACCUSER: “No.”

AUTHOR: “Well, since my character and story is a sifted composite, not just of these fifteen non-related newspaper articles, along with anonymous psychological profiles compiled in [research book titles], as well as a completely contrived time, setting, and set of circumstances, how can you claim that this character and story is all about you?”

…In short, they can’t.

So I’m done.  I’ve quit the game.  No more Blind Man’s Bluff with literary agents anymore.  Now I’ll simply write and publish, write and publish. 

I’m also pretty much done with magazine submissions of short stories, as well.  The only reason I write a short story is when one “pops” into existence on its own, so to speak — the creative Muse dictates, in other words.  Submitting them, though, is always a pain…because it requires I steal time away from other things…like novel writing.

I’m tired of all of it. I’m just not interested in literary blind man’s bluff with me the blinded and them twittering as they evade me finding “the right niche:, be that an agent or publishing venture.  You want to read me, come and get it.  My stories and novels will be availabe through The Deepening, from me here, or from various other websites around the Net.  

If you want it from the library or a book store, ask at the desk.  If you want it from Amazon.com, you’ll have to wait till the hard copy releases.

I made it into Part III.  Then, having had a full-scale revolt of both brain and eyes, I scrolled to the end to check the punchline…which I knew this story would have to have.

It did.

And it was too predictable.

As I’m chalking off yet another online magazine’s editorial staff as “punk,” my eyes are desperately seeking some place to input their resentment at having had to absorb what they did.  …But there is no feedback on this particular zine.  You can’t leave comments and feedback for author and editors.  

I suppose I could email, I thought.  …No.  Waste of effort.  They’re not interested in what I think of their poor choice.

As I close out that window, the original window comes into view, the one with the author proudly, even earnestly proclaiming the publication of her story.  I sigh and close that window, too, thankful that I don’t know this writer, thankful she doesn’t know me. I don’t have to worry about her expectations that I’ll leave a positive comment…any comment, at all.

Of course, the indie authors are simply giddy with themselves, because they somehow think that this proves their formula as exceptional. Well, it doesn’t. The majority of indie published work is a waste of time and resources (read trees). There isn’t a good process out there to weed the good, professional work out from the drivel. I sincerely hope that Dawn over at The Deepening or somebody somewhere can come up with some workable way to wade through the dross so that we who enjoy reading don’t wind up reduced to rereading what’s on our shelves.

I can see that, in the real world, libraries might be able to fulfill a quality control function. But libraries are suffering, too, and a lot of them are just turning themselves into Internet cafes and DVD outlets.

Sigh.

Most people dream about things which either they desire or they fear, which relieves their subconscious of unwanted worry, frets, and stress. Some dream symbols, but never much in the way of “making any sense”…or that’s the general gist, anyway.  Novelist’s brains, though, are creatures of a different sort altogether.  Free of the onus of having to battle the conscious will of its host person and resident body’s demands, the novelist’s brain takes sleep’s opportunity to…WRITE, PLOT, PLAN, OUTLINE, LIVE, REINVENT, MANUFACTURE, and EXPLORE the stories it insists on spawning into tangible reality whenever it can coerce and induce the person it owns and the body which owns it to sit down and type.

I tell you, it’s an exhausting thing to go to bed tired only to wind up having to gallop around all night in fictional scene-scapes.  But that’s what we novelists do, all night, every night. And you wonder why we’ve got bags under our eyes? Why we seem perpetually grumpy? Sleep is our nightmare!

I don’t overtly make any “hay” that it’s real.  I only suggest that it might be.  And that’s the only thing I can do, because there’s no way to prove something to the five empirical senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell that exists beyond the range of their pragmatic ability to experience.

What’s especially fun is to watch a complete skeptic turn white, eyes bulging, hair on the arms erect, lips quivering, when you take them to visit a friend’s house known to be “haunted.”

Take the time an old friend of mine dropped in for a visit right as I was about to go exploring an old run-down house.  He came along, laughing and jibing me about gooey goblins and lumps that go bump in the silence.  Walking into the old place, he only hesitated and turned to look when, upon walking through the sprung gate hanging crooked on its old hinges, the thing decided then was the perfect time to release an excruciating metal chatter, though we’d not touched it.  

Ascending the house, the steps creaked.  Out loud, my friend wondered if they were sound.  

“They’re cement,” I said.  

Disbelieving me, he knelt down and ran his hands over them.  ”They are,” he said, a frown on his brow.  ”Then what creaked?”

“I don’t know.”

He gave me an odd look.

We went on to explore the old place, me taking pictures and notes.  Unlikely sounds and equally unlikely movements from various quarters made him absolutely jumpy, quelling any more scoffing and teasing.  He was very quiet on the return trip home.

Me?  I don’t know.  I just know that my experiences when I visit these old places make for good story elements. 

I suppose one of these days I should write up some of these episodes as a short story or two.  Maybe, better, a novel.  But, right now, I’ve got way too much on my plate to pursue new projects.  What’s fun, though, is the possibility that ghosties are watching and nodding as skeptics turn pale.

I don’t know about other authors, but what I do is never have something so concrete that it can’t be changed — updated.  Whether it’s the climate (warming or status quo), the TV, the car and its fuel, the clothing and shoes, or the movie my characters might watch, these incidental, but temporal elements are written into the story in such a way that they can be changed to match when the book finally goes to print.

Think about what goes into a mainstream novel?  Your character stops to get a cup of coffee five years ago and pays .80 cents.  He stops today to get that same cuppa, and it costs $1.80.  ”So,” you say, “don’t price it.” Right?  Okay.  But sometimes you need to.  

How about the cell phone?  How about computers?  How about the car that runs on gasoline and suddenly we’re all driving hydrogen-fueled vehicles?  Or Ford went bankrupt in 2009 and, by 2010, doesn’t exist?  Your lead character can’t be driving a brand new Ford Mustang, now can s/he? How about the weather?  Yesterday’s temperate zone has, as of last year, become a desert.  Or polar bears went extinct last year and your story happens to have an incident in Alaska with an angry polar bear mom?  Oops!

The faster the world changes, the more problematic are the details an author includes in a story.  Trying to find some balance that allows the book to stay a good, undated, but modern read is proving unlikely in our fast-changing world.  So, now, when I write, I write with an eye to being able to change the details while holding the story so that, when an editor asks for an update to “present day two years from now,” I can attempt to do it (despite not having a crystal ball)  without having the story fall to pieces.  What doesn’t change are the characters or the plot.  Just the elements of the setting.

Of course, in my books, everything except the main characters, theme, and premise, are open to change, including plot elements.   …But that’s another story.

People, animals, and, yes, even plants, provide suitable fodder.  

“Plants?” you ask.  

Why, sure!  You think that tree branch you keep reminding yourself to dodge…and do, doesn’t purposely move to descend just the right amount to thwack you on the noggin even though you know you ducked low enough? You think that rambling rose branch you swore you tied up yesterday didn’t purposely grow another scion overnight, just as long, so it could catch you, once again, with its thorns?  How about that thistle in the grass you dug out with the weed puller just last week, getting its entire tap root.  So now your lawn is safe for walking barefoot, right?  Wrong.  You step, and — OW! — there it is…in the exact same spot!  What the–?!

People, families, and their various foibles are, of course, much more fertile resources to mine for interesting and even hardly believable fiction fodder.  That’s why the story writer has to lie, telling a more believable story than the reality presents.  

Take someone we’ll call “Sonya” and her daughter.  They get away with causing someone’s death, not once, but over five times in just under ten years, and they have yet to be caught. Yet everyone who knows them knows “they did it”…except the cops.  

How?

Sheer audacity, on one hand, and sheer stupidity upon another…but let’s not get too deeply into the hows and whys because I might want to write the story someday.  Suffice it to say, I’m going to have to adjust the “facts, Ma’am” because the truth is just too unbelievable.  I’ll have to hedge and mute and even amputate some of the most salient reasons why they keep “getting away with murder.”  To do it truthfully would just be too unbelievable and suspect.  People would guffaw and snicker, “Not possible!” So, if I write it, I’ll modify — lie — to make it more rationally feasible.  The reality, though, is, don’t get on these ladies bad side, not if you live around here…and even if you don’t…cuz they’re like a dog chewing a bone when it comes to avenging a perceived “wrong” against them.  And they never forget.  One of their victims was someone who slighted the mom way back in elementary school, some forty-five years previous.  How’s that for carrying a grudge?

Animals are some of my favorites, though.  Like the goldfish who swat their tails at their owner’s husband every time the poor guy walks past the fish tank.  Why?  ”Cause Jerry never feeds the fish, never cleans the tank, and never turns the light on,” says the owner.  ”If I go on a trip, the fish fend for themselves the whole time, even though Jerry’s in and out all day.  After I took my first two week trip, they started doing this.  I think they know he’s not their friend, so they splash him anytime he comes near. And it works, too.  He rarely goes past the fish tank, anymore.  When he does, he makes a really wide berth.” She chuckles.  ”Doesn’t matter, though.  They get him, anyway.  They’ve got a great aim.”  Noticeably, they don’t do this to strangers.  Only Jerry.  :D

Cows are great for similar tactics.  If they want to get back at you, they do it with a well-placed foot grinding yours into the ground underneath or the swat of a super-saturated tail-full of very rank and sludgy manure.

Humorous, sad, terrifying, or poignant, writing fiction becomes less that of invention and more of an exercise in skillfully adjusting truth so it’s palatable as fiction — writing lies from truth.

She’s divorced, destitute, has lost custody of her children, sucks booze down like its water, and is an all-round “problem child” — willful, petulant, throws raging tantrums. She holds no degree in anything, much less a high school diploma. Not even a GED.

Two years later, she’s pregnant by a guy who has just been released from the pen after serving time for embezzlement.  After a hard gestation, a baby girl is born.  The woman decides to go to school, gets her GED, goes on to study school administration, secures a degree, is hired as a counselor, continues her education until she qualifies and secures a job as a principal at a school for low achievers — mostly populated by the children of migrant workers.

Throughout this time, the woman returns home for visits, bringing the child with her each year. By ten months, the child is beginning to scream…a LOT. By two, the child is willful and resists guidance — pretty typical for a two-year-old.  By three and four, this resistance has turned into defiance.  By five and six, the child lies, sneaks, and steals…and, if corrected by someone other than her mother, strikes out with physical violence, lambasting Grandma and Auntie, too. By eight, the child is leading other children into trouble — climbing onto roofs, breaking windows…. I witness this child push her younger cousin off the roof after luring him up there. (He survives.)

Mom and daughter, plus husband move back with Grandms laying claim to grandma’s property…or trying to.  Securing another counselling job with the local school district, the lady wants to be a principal again. Her choice of school? The juvenile delinquent’s “alternative” high school. “They need a strong hand to get them on the right path,” she says.  (She’s still sucking down booze like it’s water.)

Now the neighborhood gets to witness the woman’s handling of her child, who is as willful and out of control as the lady was herself as a teen, Grandma tells us. One hears screaming. Child runs out the door, mother hot on her tail.  When mom catches up, child crouches down and covers her head with her hands, begging, “Please, please. Don’t hit me. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to,” and so on. Mom has her fist raised, screaming at the child, but stops suddenly when she sees the neighbors watching. She bends over, grabs the kid by the hair, and drags her back inside.

This is not a woman who needs to be principal of any school, nor a counselor, either. Ultimately, though, the lady does get a job as principal, not at the alternative high school, but at the regular middle school.

Now, remember, the above is a true account, not fiction. …So this is the kind of stuff that feeds my books — real life happenings I’ve witnessed, or which I’ve seen part of the scenario and get filled in on the rest by the neighbors and relatives talking about the family’s history.

First we have the persistent “I” narrative. If the story needs the “I” POV, I’m all for it, but, mostly, it’s just sadly rendered, poorly masked author angst and auto-biographical fantasizing. Next comes the too obvious podium/pulpit pounding. Then there’s the “I love elves,” the “I love guns and heroes/heroines” and the “I wanna be loved” lot. Predictably, all these grand and glorious tales are laden with telling me their story instead of showing me by making me live it. Predictably, the leading characters are the usual archetypes and phenotypes (skinny and weedy; lithe and lissome; overly buxom; ripped and shredded…as in body builder — you get the picture). Predictably, the narratives are saturated with really sucky writing, filled to the rim with badly constructed sentences, misplaced modifiers, and adverbial flatulence. (And, by the way, I’m not one of those “kill all adverbs” readers. Adverbs are effective when judiciously placed and properly used.) But.

The word that most arises when I start scanning the critique slush is: insipid, sadly insipid. Oddly, most children’s story authors do not qualify for my despair. I’m finding, more and more, that children’s authors know their stuff, even if the stories aren’t quite my cup of recreational tea. The rest? Well, maybe one offering a month is worth my efforts to read and offer up opinion. Otherwise, I just silently bow out. No sense puncturing anyone’s balloon, especially since so many others can and do blithely offer the writer sodden, even artfully succulent praise for work I consider just litter.