Sleepless Rambling About Impossible Wishes

So I couldn’t sleep and I had this story idea flitting around in my head and decided to write it out and get it out of my head and figured that might help me sleep.  The characters are based on people I know in real life and in the story, one character does something for another that is absolutely wonderful and needed but could never happen in the real world.  It made me sad.  I’ve never wanted so badly to do something for someone that was so impossible.  I thought about making it impossible in the story as well, but my thing about writing is that I have to live in and live with the real world, while  I can create whatever kind of world I want in the stories I write and I can make whatever I want real there – so why ever do things the same way they are in reality when I don’t have to?  Of course, with that kind of attitude, you can cheapen a story easily by not forcing a character to go through something they don’t want to go through but need to and giving them what they want but don’t need instead.  Right now this particular story is just a pair of scenes and a handful of back story notes, but I want to see it happen in real life instead of just on paper in a fantasy adventure story.

And that’s why I want to write books that are eventually published worldwide.  If I can capture that impossible wish, wrap it up, and present it to the world as a story, someone somewhere will read that and get inspired by it and maybe that someone will have the right talent and skill and training to make that impossible wish into something possible.

There is so much power in the written word:  to make people think, to make people dream, to make people hate someone, love something, or believe in things they can’t see.  Through the written word, others have changed the world.  Of course, it also depends on how the world interprets what you write, and there’s no way to control that.  But there is something to be said for trying.  And if I never try or if I ever stop trying, I’ll never know what impossible wishes someone could have made possible because of something I never wrote.

Someday all the things we once thought were entirely impossible will be things we take for granted as part of a daily routine.

Getting Lost in Writing and Vice Versa

I was talking with a friend the other day about philosophy and the meaning of life and explained that the reason I decided not to major in philosophy (and the reason that I do not allow myself to study it at all) is that I am afraid I would get lost in it and never come back and never be able to fully function in reality.  I’m the same way about art as well.  Latin, on the other hand, is something I enjoy and I can get lost in, but I can always come back whenever I need/want to.  Reading is harder to come back from, but the book always ends eventually anyway, which means that I will have to come back no matter what, so I don’t mind that pleasure either.

When I considered my relationship with Writing, I came to a conundrum:  I’m not sure whether it’s me who’s lost in my writing or if it’s my writing that’s lost in me.  I can sit down with a computer, or with pen and paper, or with the notepad feature on my cell phone, or even just the inside of my own head and compose any amount of writing and be completely lost in it.  When the inspiration passes, I come back to reality and am no longer lost in my writing.  However, I also often notice myself narrating my life and the lives of those around me without really thinking about it – as if I suddenly realized the pattern of my own breathing or the sound of my own heartbeat.  It’s constantly in the background, rasping and drumming as the bass-line of my existence.

So far, I have come up with two possible answers.  One is that I am already so overly consumed with writing (and always have been since I first understood the concept of storytelling) that I am already completely lost in it and will never come back (though, clearly, I can still function in reality quite well).  The second possible answer is that while I can get myself lost in my writing sometimes, my writing can also get itself lost in me.

That idea makes me wonder about existence in general and what would it be like to be just a character in someone’s book, at the mercy of some anonymous god I had never met but who controlled every aspect of my life?  How much free will do we as authors really give our characters and how much of that free will do those characters really accept and exercise (if they are truly capable of it at all)?  I am a big believer in developing your characters and allowing them to drive the plot and the story along as much as possible, and refraining from “divine intervention” whenever you can, but I wonder sometimes how much of that is illusion and how much of it isn’t.