Sock Puppets

Fiction is an extremely limiting genre of writing.  Ever since I was old enough to write stories, I did, usually fashioning them after a book I liked at the time.  And I thought I was amazing at it, but something funny happens as you grow up and learn new things.  You realize actually how bad you were to begin with.  If I ever do try to write something fiction now, I am confronted with the awful dilemma of lying to my audience.  Of course, they know that I am lying to them, but still.  If I'm going to make something up, I need to make it a good lie at the very least.

And this is where the problem starts.  I like to focus on the character, what he's feeling, what he thinks.  The only issue is I can't seem to write about things I haven't experienced.  I can't write about being in nineteenth century France because first I live in the twenty-first century and second I've never been to France.  I can't write about a male perspective because I've never experienced that.  Every time I try to pick up and write, I just as  soon stop when I realize how limited my life has been.

Obviously, this doesn't bother many writers.  Some choose to ignore it completely, writing about vampires, werewolves, and a whole list of things no healthy human has seen.  Others imagine around it and simply imagine what it might feel like.  But for me, that sort of imagining is just like lying to myself.  I can't tell myself I know what it's like to be Amish or a cheerleader or being able to sing.  It just ends in bad writing.

This is why I've come to appreciate nonfiction writing.  I can take something that's real (or at the very least based on something real) and fashion words around it.  The tone and style that result become so much more vivid and represenative of myself.  Although it is thrilling to live through a character and watch her grow into her own person, I can't help the selfish inclination to write from my point of view.  For one thing, it is so much easier.  I don't have to add insane amounts of dialogue if what I really want to do is rattle around a bit inside the topic I've chosen.  The narrative is what is powerful and compelling, not the characters, because when you step back and look, the characters are only sock puppets for the author, and unless that author is extremely talented, the sock puppets resemble those made by a child in daycare.