Fantasy vs. Reality

No matter how hard we writers try to withstand it, our characters live with us. We write them on paper in ink or on the white computer spread sheet, but they are our pure imaginations, the figments of fantasy in our minds. This topic really made me curious, how do we come up with characters? Do we perhaps spin known images in our mind to come up with the perfect fit? What if my lead character has my sister’s nose or an actor’s face or perhaps just a stranger’s? Recent studies I looked at say that our characters are spun from all those images that our mind process every single day of our lives. It’s just like writing music. The melodies come to you from universal channels, from songs that you have heard, and from notes that that musician just played. That is simply how our brains work. We use everything we have; we combine it, to create something new and something completely unique. Something of our own, yet it’s simply a puzzle that is laid out from many pieces that have already been known, and that have been laid out by others.


As I think of it more and more. It is the same writing a novel. People say that nothing can be completely unique, and I never agreed until just recently. Why? Maybe just because I believed in my idea so much that I thought that I had created something amazing and I still do. But as I think of it more and more I realize that my novel is simply a puzzle laid out from so many pieces that I have already experienced. Whether those pieces are figments of my own life, strangers, movies, the media or even other books. As I wander off to this topic, I ask myself a question. A question that haunts my mind like an unwanted guest. Is that all there is to our imagination? Is that how our brain works? Combining what we already know to create something new? We create our fantasy worlds to believe in, yes. Some authors create something that they wish that they themselves could experience. Some wish that they could pick up a sword and have the skills of their main character, and some believe in their characters as if they were real. The reason for my points is simple and related to my title. Isn’t Fantasy basically reality? We make it up from what we see, what we sense, touch and feel. And sometimes we even get so lost in our own created worlds that our characters seem real to us, and we just cannot abandon this novel that we are writing because this character really means something to us. Tell me what you guys think.



A.E