Truth or Dare

The truth is often a weird, scary place to live. How's that for cognitive dissonance? Can you live in the truth? I think you can, but it's hard, frightening, soul baring.

Take fiction, for example. You can write a character that is very open and honest, but you better deal with the ramifications of that honesty in the work, or your reader will shoot you down with one glance. You can, on the other hand, write a character that is not so fond of living in the truth and what do you have? Probably a closer picture of what life is like for all of us who toil in the real world, with real dreams that are often pinned and cramped by circumstances, who suffer and strive and love and in the end aren't brave enough to do what must be done to fulfill the dreams that are often tantalizingly close. Those are real characters. We all want to see the happy ending, don't we? We all want our characters not to crash and burn. But only the naked optimists out there write those characters into anything other than melodrama or romance novels. Tolstoy said, and I paraphrase (badly), we don't want to read about happy people because they are boring. Instead, give us the tormented, the yearning, the twisted souls. Let's party with those characters! These are the fun folks.

Such it is in life, too. We can think about the safe, the sheltered, and the calm, or we can think about the stormy, gale-tossed little ships out there whipping around in the rain (a cliche...good God, I wrote a horrendous cliche- but it makes sense in light of the end of the post, trust me....I'm a professional, don't try this at home). Those ships sometimes make it to port, other times go down on the reef, but they were making the action happen. And if they make it, whoa, now there's a party. All those lusty sailors cavorting with wine wenches under the Caribbean sun, bodice ripping galore, and a pretty good keg of rum! Such is life in fiction, such is life in, well, life. And, with all respect to Tolstoy, those unhappy characters that make it out of the storm go on to be happy characters after all.

I mean, what's so wrong with romance novels anyway?