Take Five
Five-minute reads about writing
Nov. 3 - Nov. 30, 2010
Courtesy: Sasha Soren (Random Magic)
Twitter: @RandomMagicTour
#17 of 30: A worldly education
Q: Which writers have most influenced you and your writing?
A: Other writers aren’t so much a direct influence, as life, itself.
Even though fiction can be about nearly anything you can think of or imagine, the logic has to be self-contained within one particular book (or series of books).
But in real life -- oh, anything can and often does happen. Logic, sometimes, goes right out the window.
So, it’s much more interesting to use life, not any particular book or series of books, as a source of fuel. So much more can happen.
I don’t think that you necessarily have to write down something just as it happened, otherwise you’d be writing non-fiction, or an article in a newspaper.
But I do think that if you want to understand how life works, you have to observe life, not someone’s rendition of it.
If you want to understand how people work, then observe people, not characters in a book.
That said, you can occasionally learn something about human beings through characters in books. More on that, here.
From author interview with Sasha Soren.
Interviewer: The Bookette (@the_bookette)
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