I have a confession to make. While I love to read, I don’t read fiction. Over the span of my lifetime, I have perhaps read less than 50 books that were fiction. I managed to make it through The Old Man and the Sea but never could mount an assault on any one of Hemingway’s tomes. I read the whole series of Tom Corcoran books about his fictional crime investigating photographer in Key West, but have yet to read a single James Bond thriller (or see a single James Bond movie).
I have read Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island, but Following the Equator and Kidnapped remain on my bookshelf, collecting dust. I do admit to reading Great Expectations, but the only Christmas Carol I have been engrossed in is the version Bill Murray did, and I’m pretty sure it was entirely faithful to Dickens’ original. I don’t remember Ebenezer Scrooge being a golfer.
I have friends who pour through fiction. My own mother, bless her heart, can read an entire book in a long afternoon. Me, it can take weeks, months even. I just can’t seem to get my arms wrapped around the idea of fiction.
Go figure! I’m a damned writer after all. You’d think I would be like most writers and glom on to the work of others, enjoying their own journey into their minds and imaginations, appreciating the selection of every carefully penned word that managed to make it past their critical, writer eye.
I have long wondered why I don’t get into fiction. I have even started two fiction books myself, Brewster McCabe: Private Eye and For the Corporate Good. Both are pretty damned good, though I confess that Brewster has been in process for about 20 years now because I came to realized that it was as much an autobiography as it was a tongue in cheek detective story. So many things that happened in my own life are woven into the pages of Brewster that I can’t really tell what is and what isn’t fiction.
And therein lies the problem, I think. I live a pretty fictional life. In many respects, I am a living, breathing work of fiction. The pages are filled with adventures, memorable characters, impossible settings and scenarios, plenty of drama, moments of humor and even some intrigue. It is a rich story that is unique to me, but identifiable to many, for we all live a life of fiction.
As I’ve said here and there, we create our own life. We make it up as we go along. There is no master plan for us, except the one we dream up. Our life has a beginning, a middle and an end, just like a novel. Along the way, there are twists and turns, some so unbelievable that no author or filmmaker would ever allow it to stay on a page or be shown on the silver screen.
Yet to us it is completely normal. Just like the words that unfold in a story, we get caught up in the plot, we revel in where it is taking us, this journey we call our life. No one has ever written anything like it, and yet we add to its pages every day without a thought.
I always laugh when someone tells me they can’t write or that they aren’t creative. There are two sides to writing: the learned side and the side no one can teach you. Anyone can learn the rules of writing. You can even learn them to the point that you can break them with great zeal. I do all the time. Rules, as we know, are meant to be broken, and the very nature of writing is so personal that standardized rules can’t accommodate all our needs.
I like to think of the whole learned side as a framework. It’s the girders and beams of a building. The design of the building is what we get to create. It’s our own story. It will never be told again in exactly the same way. We are uniquely its author.
I’m luckier than some. I have found a way to get close to my story, to own the telling of it, whether it’s in these RobZerrvations or in my memoirs, or even Brewster McCabe, with all its puns, plays on words and veiled and not so veiled references to my life and its foibles.
So perhaps that’s why I’m not big on fiction. My own life is better fiction than any writer can come up with. There have been times that it has been a bigger mystery than anything Agatha Christie dreamed up. And at other times, it has been a nightmare that even Stephen King couldn’t have conceived. Yes, even Robert Louis Stevenson couldn’t top the adventures I’ve had.
I guess fiction seems a little pedestrian to me. I am fortunate enough to be both the subject and the author of a masterpiece, one that I can relive over and over in my own mind, or in the things I actually write down. I can run it through my Mental Cuisinart and frappe it into anything I want, keeping facts I like and getting rid of those that don’t amuse me or resonate with my audience.
That is the fun of creating our own work of fiction. Our old language arts teacher isn’t there to grade us on it. There’s no final exam. You simply toil away at the saga, adding page after page, until one day you get to that place all writers do. Those two words that every work of fiction shares: The End.
In the Emerald City, trying to conjugate my verbs so I can take them to work with me today,
– Robb