Real But Not Real

I have a story in this week’s Take a Break about a pushy granny. Regular readers of this blog may recall that I encountered such a woman last year. My beloved read it and said “I know what inspired that, but the real woman was much worse than the granny in your story.”

Yes, I think she was and I toned her down. But fiction isn’t real life. It has to sound real, but it doesn’t have to BE real. Sometimes real just doesn’t cut it – real is too unbelievable.

Fate gave me my character; all I had to do was provide her comeuppance.

Sometimes I am asked what inspired a particular story and it is unusual for me to be able to say precisely what it was, but Granny did – thank you Granny!

More about writing - my lovely daughter got me and my beloved tickets to see Julian Clary doing his Lord of the Mince tour again (she took me last May when he was doing a pre-tour show). My other half wore his best shoes in case he got called up on stage – he didn’t, bless him, but I think that even he, shy retiring soul that he is, would have enjoyed the experience. I know I would.

In the souvenir brochure – which has some pictures of gorgeous Julian that I could look at all day - Julian talks a bit about writing. He doesn’t plot his novels. He doesn’t know how they are going to end until he gets to the end.

When I read that I could have jumped for joy. I’ve tried plotting things in many different ways. Notebooks, large sheets of paper covered in lines and circles, index cards, folders stuffed with photos and profiles, folders containing folders on my desktop, even people cut out of catalogues!

All too often I find that if I know how a story is going to end, I lose interest. I work better without a plot. Yes and there are those who know me who would say I’d lost the plot years ago. It took me ages to find the ending for my granny and it wasn’t easy, but once it fell into place it was as if it had always been meant to be that way.

Anyway, something rather horrible happened this week. Not horrible in an earth shattering people died kind of way, but horrible in a gut wrenching it made me cry and I can’t stop thinking about it because it’s haunting me kind of way.

I was going to blog about it, but I’m working it into a story instead. In that sense I find writing can be very therapeutic. Sometimes it takes me years to write about something bad that happened. I still haven’t been able to write about my dog Sweep dying eight years ago. But something happened after he died and it is something I must write about one day.

Sorry if this all sounds a bit mysterious, but I find the minute I open my big mouth and start talking about a story, I might just as well dig a hole, bury it and forget about it.

And for no other reason than I’ve been thinking about him recently and I still miss him and he was one of my best friends ever this is Sweep.

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