So my mom tells me I should write fiction. She tells me my blog is just so great, and that when I was taken to the hospital for the first time, the guy who interviewed me about what I believed told her that I should be a fiction writer, because he was impressed by what I told him, despite the fact that it wasn't true.
I didn't know that the guy said this, my mom just told me this yesterday. But it made me very glad that other people appreciated the greatness of my delusions, and it was funny to think he said this even though at that time I hadn't even figured everything out yet so there were massive holes in the story.
The thing is, the time when I became delusional was the time I struck gold. I came up with an awesome story, although it is not without plot holes, I don't think any of them are massive enough that they couldn't be smoothed over and the story couldn't be made into a movie. But I was in quite a bit of a different state when I came up with this, I was the most fucked up on life at that point and I wasn't even on anything (unusual). I kind of think it wasn't even me who came up with this story, I was just somehow tapping into a higher source. All the loose ends tie together in the end, like they do in any good story. That's what fiction is about: coming up with a bunch of events that follow a pattern and create a bunch of loose ends that tie together in the end, in a way that leaves you with a feeling of victory and has some sort of lesson about life. My delusions have all that.
Most of the time, I'm not that great at writing fiction. Coming up with stories isn't my creative strength. My creative strength comes out when I program computer games, and I come up with ways to model real life phenomena amongst a colony of virtual bugs. It's freaking awesome. But when it comes to fictional stories, I'm not good at coming up with stuff that's original and not stupid.
So two years ago I was writing a fictional story based on my delusions, like how it could have been if my delusions were true. I decided it made the story stronger if the main character (who wasn't me) told stupid lies all the time. Don't ask. So I would have him say something strange, and I was cracking myself up with the stuff I came up with. Then afterwards, every time, the person whom he was talking to would say, "interesting." Every time. It was a little thing I had going.
But I got frustrated. I had a lot of dialogue, but in every scene it was people talking about their majors (because it took place in college). Sure college students talk about their majors, but they talk about other things too. What do I have them talk about? I don't know! Guys by themselves. What do guys by themselves talk about when there aren't any girls around? How am I supposed to know? Yet I am somehow supposed to make the dialogue sound realistic and true to life. In order to be any good at this, I would have to spend a great deal of time observing people and their dialogue in the real world.
As I'm sitting here thinking, I'm remembering a time when I was a freshman in high school and I wrote a story about a teenage girl going on a camping trip with her family that people liked. The thing that people liked about it was the voice of the girl, not the plot, the plot kind of sucked. For people who don't know voice in writing refers to when something is told from a certain person's perspective, the sense of personality of the person you get based on the way they talk and the stuff they say.
So anyway, maybe I should focus on middle grade fiction for girls.
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