“Inspiration” is a double entendre - meaning both and at the same time - the genesis of thought - AND the influence of thought.
To put it another way, the creative works and people that inspire our success as writers, AND the events of reality which have seemed to somehow influence our works in some way.
When the craziness of reality surpasses the craziness of what seems appropriate in your fiction work, even though your fiction work is in part supposed to be a caricature of reality - it can be maddening when the only trespass on our input into the conversation, the psyche of literaria - is time. But fiction has to make sense. Reality doesn’t. So fiction will never truly be a caricature of reality. It sucks. But we have to put up and shut up.
Think of the creators and writers over on Homeland, and what fucking bizarre circumstances they have to put up with. They write about an embassy getting taken over by outside forces, but before the episode goes to air, a completely different embassy gets taken over by outside forces in real life.
This is when reality surpasses the craziness of fiction.
The exact same phenomenon is happening to me - Right now, I’m working on my very first novel. It’s a psychological espionage comedy thriller - but when I started writing the thing - the world really couldn’t care less about Donald Trump or his merry band of Nazis.
And whatever other deplorable fuckholes and misfits he’s had lanyarded to the dead animal on his head over the past year and a half were thought to have been relegated to dust. What I, nor any of my other compatriots at the Western Washington International Affairs Association and the Political Science Association did NOT see coming was how influential these completely fucking unknowns - namely - Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and others - would be for the gullible middle-American.
Les be honest - did you REALLY know what Info Wars was before this election? Prolly not, because Alex Jones is fucking insane. That’s a fact. He can’t sue me for libel, because his case wouldn’t stand up in court. Did you know what Breitbart was before this election? I’m guessing, again, that you didn’t.
That’s OK - what that means is that YOU have a brain, and when you see some fake news shit, you probably just did what I did - and pressed SKIP.
Nobody saw that coming. But what it proves is that there are a lot more Gullible people out there than we thought.
A major element in my novel is a band of neo-nazis fucking things up for decent people.
Again, when I started writing it, neo-nazis were thought to be a dying breed - only survived by Ross Kemp on Gangs, the place that is called Orange County, and the movie American History X. But Trump has given them a legitimacy never seen before. Remember, Dewey lost that famous election.
Now - I wasn’t REALLY trying to make that kind of political statement when I started the novel - but now, I’m not sure. Has reality itself adapted to constrain to my narrative? Am I having something to do with all of this?
For all of the research that has gone into it, the genesis of ideas is a relatively unknown phenomenon. There are so many holes in our knowledge of where ideas come from.
There is an entire science, called Noetics, that suggests that human beings can subconsciously communicate not only with others - thereby incepting ideas between them - but also with physical substances themselves. As light has physical properties but is not a physical element, and electricity, and magnets - scientists are suggesting that there might be physical properties inside of our own nervous system.
But there is a hypothesis out there that ideas might actually spread without ever seeing them equivocated in speech - only concentrated on hard enough. I don’t know if we even have the tools to study this - but if it’s true, then that might mean that the only thing necessary to dictate reality is a single thought.
Now that’s some zen shit.
When faced with the concept of reality surpassing the craziness of fiction, the only advice I can proffer is to put up and shut up. Finish the script, the novel, the comic - whatever you’re working on. Don’t worry about reality - because reality is ultimately useless to your characters. Aside from keeping yourself alive to write another day, and researching the dimensions on ballast tanks for your smash hit thriller about submarines - reality is bullshit.
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