I Is Not Me

Almost every time we have a fiction writer doing a reading here at Books Inc., a good bit of the Q&A section revolves around that old reliable question-- "Is [insert protagonist name] you?"
Some writers say "Of course," others say, "Nuh-uh, no way, and I'm kind of insulted that you asked," but for the most part the answer is "Yes and no." Some part of the character usually comes from the author's own experience, but hopefully this part is embellished and improved by creative invention. That is, after all, what fiction is supposed to be about.

Not that so many people have asked me questions about my fiction, but that one has come up, and my answer is the middle-of-the-road position. I've usually written about things that a) I cared about and b) I had some knowledge of... and both of those criteria tend to point me toward my own experience. But (sorry) my own experience needs a little reworking to be worth reading about. Sometimes it needs a wholesale reinvention.

Of course, this leaves me open on two fronts. If my fictional character expresses a little of my dark side, and say, cheats on a girlfriend or robs a liquor store, people seem all too ready to believe I'm capable of those things. If on the other hand, the fictional character wins a thousand dollars at the racetrack or climbs a Sierra Nevada fourteener, the fiction is suspect, because, after all, I probably haven't really done those things.

But it doesn't matter. Maybe I've done all those things. Maybe I haven't done any of them. What matters is that somehow, somewhere, sometime, I had a feeling that I'm trying to evoke in the reader. And if it takes a little hyperbole to achieve that, if it takes a fictional grizzly bear to recreate the effect of a real-life raccoon, then so be it. The only sin is if it's bad hyperbole.