Fiction, Really ??

When I wrote this post, a lot of people I knew asked me whether this was a real incident or a fictional one. All I replied was, ‘Sssh.. it’s a secret’. And I don’t know what people construed out of it. This hasn’t been the sole case. A lot of friends who read me have asked me similar questions when they have read some or the other post.

Haven’t you heard that real life inspires our films? And isn’t it vice versa too? Don’t films have an impact on real life too, good as well as bad? Can something similar be said for our literary world too? We know that reading inspires people in real life. But is it also the other way round? Does fiction get inspired from real life too?

Isn’t it possible that fiction writers create characters, situations and stories that they have seen or even been a part of? The situations we read about in books, the short crisp stories we read on blogs could actually have been enacted in real life.

Those thousands of characters we come across the pages of hardcovers and paperbacks, the ones we glance through the silvery screens of our ebook readers may have lives of their own, may be they are real people just dipped in the colours of fiction by the writers by giving them fancy names, adding the right amount of texture, may be mixing more than one real life character to create a completely new persona that gets the author appreciated for a well sketched character. May be even the dialogues have actually been said in real life between people, only to be added by the observant author just at the correct time in the story.   

While breaking up, one of my friend’s ex-boyfriend on being asked what about the promises that he had made, had said that she could kill him for not fulfilling those promises but he would never spend his life with her. Doesn’t this line resonate to this - “I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.” (Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead) And I am pretty much sure that that guy has never ever heard about The Fountainhead, forget about reading it. Of course, Ayn Rand wrote it much before. But when she told me about that line, I remembered the book.

Haven’t we all used ‘come on, you don’t have to be sorry’ to our loved ones sometime or the other. Just that Eric Segal put it in Love Story as “Love means never having to say you're sorry.”

Whosoever thought about creating the characters of nosy neighbours and aunties, about the ever confused young generation, about those over-the-top loud Punjabi characters; I am sure must have met a few around.  

And what about coincidentally meeting the girl you had a crush in your school after several years, the hero falling in love with a nerd girl or vice versa, tit-for-tat for your mother-in-law, steamy romantic scenes, hard break-up stories, tales about wrong decisions of life; may be all of such situations have actually happened, may be they are happening even right now. God knows which pair of writer eyes is witnessing them and creating new masterpieces about them in their head.

Have you done it? Like, have you created stories out of real life characters and situations?

This post is written as a part of April A to Z Challenge 2014 under Non-Themed category. I am doing two posts for this Challenge and Themed posts can be found here.