> I write stories for a living, but I also write stories for fun. The difference is, all of the stories I write for my job are true, whereas maybe half of the stories I write as a form of leisure are fiction.
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> I write fictional stories about characters created by other people, but I also write fictional stories about characters that I've come up with on my own. And here's where it gets interesting, because in many of the most important ways, there are no real differences in the ways that I write other people's characters, versus the ways that I write my own.
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> Indeed, there are arguably remarkably few differences in the ways that I write stories that are true, versus stories that are fiction, which is a weird thing to say when you're a newspaper reporter who also writes Doctor Who fan fiction and stories about original superhero characters, but I nonetheless contend that it fits.
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> Writing fiction, after all, has the potential to be an incredibly egocentric exercise, because in essence, you basically have to believe that the contents of your own head are sufficient to comprise an entire reality of their own. For those who are self-aware enough to be apprehensive about the implications of that, there are a few crutches you can employ - not that they mean that you're not a worthy writer, but rather, they mean that you know that you're still a little shaky on the bicycle, so even if it's just for psychological reasons, you'd prefer to leave the training wheels on, even if they're ratcheted up so high that you might as well be riding without them anyway.
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> Fanfic is a crutch, in that sense. I hesitate to say that, because it's not a bad crutch, but it is something to lean on. It's no more "wrong" than driving a car that other people have built and maintained - you just want to drive it to where you'd like to go, without having to worry about the rest of the details. The first time I ever heard of fanfic, all the way back in my college years in the early 1990s, it was described to me as "taking your favorite characters out for a test-drive," and even now, I'd say that description remains as true as ever.
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> Another crutch, which gets alluded to a lot less as even being a "crutch," is the appropriation of people, places and events from real life. This is why former journalists like Thomas Harris and, yes, even Dave Barry can create such great "fictional" stories, because they look at the world around them (and all of its inhabitants) as though they're interviewing it, and part of that whole gig is simply noticing the details - accents and speech patterns, quotes and word choices, behavior and physical gestures, ironic circumstances and the like - and then retelling it to their readers. In that sense, I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that people in my profession are basically paid to plagiarize from real life itself.
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> This has had an impact upon the way I view fictional storytelling, and especially fictional characters, in ways that probably go a long way toward explaining my distaste for certain writers. After all, even when I was a little kid, I kind of knew that my own perceptions had limits - especially since I was initially diagnosed as autistic when I was much younger, I suspect in part because of how far removed my own perspective was from that of most other people - so if I wanted to tell decent stories, I had to find a way of stepping outside of myself. I'm always slightly stunned and dismayed, whenever I hear writers talk about characters in terms of being purely fictional constructs, because every time I've tried to write that way, the results have easily been the worst stories I've ever written.
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> By contrast, the best stories I've ever written - not just in my own eyes, but in the near-unanimous opinions of everyone else who's read them - have been those in which I've treated the characters like real people, who have always existed, and will always exist, independently outside of myself.
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> You've heard of "Method acting"? Call this "Method writing."
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> Regardless of who created them, when I write about characters, they don't simply exist as devices, to spout my dialogue and drive my plots. They're my friends, and rather than writing to dictate their thoughts and deeds, I'm writing to discover those things about them. Even with characters that I've created, it's taken me years to figure some of them out, because rather than inventing them, I feel like I'm learning about them, often through a process that I can only compare to conversation, and depending upon the characters in question, if they don't feel like revealing certain parts of themselves to me, then it's easy for me to get stuck in neutral. In fact - and I've heard other writers talk about going through similar experiences - there have been times when I've come up with story ideas for my characters, but when it came time to write those ideas out, the characters themselves literally refused to follow my scripts for them, because in my mind, they'd become so fully developed as people in their own right.
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> Now, I'll be the first to admit that this approach to fiction-writing simply does not work for any number of different types of stories, any more than would, say, a stream-of-consciousness-written murder-mystery, or a fully improv-acted episode of Law & Order, filmed live in front of a studio audience. Certain types of stories need set-in-stone endings that everything else builds up to, but those types of stories tend not to interest me as much, as either a writer or a reader. It's rare that I can ever figure out the ending of, for example, a murder-mystery, no matter how glaringly obvious it is, and it's even rarer that I can write a story in which events intentionally lead to a predetermined end. I see that as roadmap writing, and the only way it works for me is if the scenery, the detours or the destination (or, ideally, all three) are especially enriching and worthwhile. A lot of roadmap-written stories are, but a lot of them aren't, because they betray their natures too easily, and characters whom I must care about, in order to continue traveling with them, are too easily revealed as merely being vehicles themselves.
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> Maybe it's the investigator in me. When I write about a character, what I'm always wondering is, "So, who is this person?" When I write about a story idea, plot development or series of events, what I'm always wondering is, "Well, what would happen next?" Part of the reason I keep asking myself these questions is because, no matter how much I know or learn, I can never reach the point where I'm entirely sure of the answers. So many writers seem to see narratives as means to an end, but for me, storytelling is more of an open-ended exploration, which I'd like to think makes me a good writer in many ways, even though I have to concede that it probably makes me a terrible writer in just as many other, albeit different, ways. I've been told by more people than I've kept track of that I'm great at dialogue, but I don't need anyone to tell me that my conclusions frequently falter. I don't have a "killer instinct" for pulling the trigger on my own characters, or even saying goodbye to them. My cast of original characters includes a few I created all the way back in grade school. They're my friends, after all, and as much as I enjoy the narratives, those are more just excuses to hang out with my friends.
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> Still, after moving around so much in my life that so many of my best friends are now often not much more than names on screens, with whom I have similar written conversations, I think I'm entitled to want to hold onto my "other friends," whether they be the ones that I've created, or the ones that other people have created and shared with the rest of us. Yes, certain types of stories cannot end properly without tragedy or loss or saying farewell, but does every type of story have to end that way?
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> Because, guess what? This current zeitgeist, of downer endings that exist solely for their own sake, which both I and seriousfic have decried? We're far from alone in noticing how played-out it's become.
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