The Reality of Reality

I’ve often thought about how odd it all is. Reality, after all, is a strange thing. In writing fiction, be it for literary purposes, for television, a movie, or what-have-you, what you put down has to be believable in a certain sort of way. That is to say, the recipient of the aforementioned fictitious material must be willing to accept said material within whatever framework it is presented. If you, for instance, write a science fiction story your readership must be willing to accept the behaviors of your main character. So, if you write this, utterly make-believe, person into a futuristic time setting wherein rocket ships and space aliens are all flitting about doing their futuristic alien business, then you must attribute behaviors to this non-existent person that readers will accept. If you, for example, have this person zooming around the galaxy in a super-duper, spandy new, shiny rocket but also have him wearing a pistol on a hip-holster than you will have to make this pistol into some kind of futuristic death-ray rather than a turn-of-the-century six shooter.

Fictional setting aside, reality is truly a relative term. My reality is that I am sitting, this very moment, in front of a computer punching buttons on a keyboard in order to string perfectly lovely words together. Meanwhile, somewhere outside my window, perhaps a mile away or perhaps 20 miles away, there exists a living, breathing, flesh and bones human being whose reality is one of hunger and homelessness. The only thing that separates my reality from that of this hungry homeless person is experience. By way of example, I have lived through times of extreme poverty, I have witnessed my own mother giving birth to my brother when I was no more than six-years-old, I tasted my first puff of marijuana when I was less than six-years-old, I lived for more than nine years in an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship and did so completely of my own choosing. I have experienced childbirth twice, I have experienced having my children both taken away from me and returned to me. I have worked in extremely rural and difficult to reach locations with multiple teenage boys who had all been convicted of truly heinous crimes (mostly of a sexual nature and almost unanimously perpetrated against small children). As a part of that job I was required to wrestle those, chillingly deviant, young men to the ground and hold them pinioned with my hands and knees by sheer force. I have experienced what it is to truly, from the depths of my very soul, Hate someone, an emotion so extreme that at the time I truly believed that if I were to witness that persons violent and prolonged death I would not be traumatized by it but rather relieved, perhaps even elated. I have experienced what it is to truly, from the depths of my very soul, Love someone, in a maternal fashion, in a platonic fashion, and in a romantic fashion. All of these experiences, and many more, seemed utterly real and ordinary, completely correct in every way, to me at the time that I experienced them, in retrospect still seem so.

The question I pose now, oh fictional reader, is this: Can you identify with all of those experiences? Some? None? What experiences have you lived through that other people might find extraordinary, but that you do not?

Is the secret to successful writing the ability to string words together to create vivid realities in such a way that total strangers can identify with, even in the face of finding such experiences utterly extraordinary? Is it the ability to convey experience you, as the writer, have never experienced at all?

Have you ever found yourself in the midst of an experience that you knew many people would find extraordinary and been surprised to learn that it was simply another event that you had to live through and not exciting or romantic in the least, no matter how hard television, newspapers, and movies try to make it appear to be so? As a writer are you willing and/or able to use that, whether exactly as it happened or completely fictionalized and exaggerated, in a way that will make me, as a reader, identify with?

What say you?