I’m not sure if people are very interesting, but that’s what I’m led to believe in the course of my reading. Fictional people are all very interesting. They all have this tough, cool outer shell but really inside they’re smart and nice. I kind of don’t believe that that’s real. In my experience, people who act tough are. Or they’re idiots. And cool people… well, there’s not a lot of actually cool people. Most people just act cool, and really they’re kind of posers.
Gee, now that I think of it, even realistic fiction isn’t usually so realistic. I’m sure you’ve heard something along the lines of ‘Oh, if only boys in real life were like boys in books…’ from some source. And that basically goes along with my point. Book characters are not like real people. That’d be boring. Real people are all posers.
NO! I take that back. Some real people are posers. Not all. Not only did the last sentence in the third paragraph make me sound insufferably Holden Caulfield-ish, it was kind of an oxymoron.
Book characters kind of act more real… they’re fearless and funny and they say whatever they want, because they’re not real and the author is just having fun. You can be anyone you want when you’re writing. Reading
If I were an author, I’d want to create something completely gorgeous and stunning. Go into it with the intention of making people laugh and cry and feel. Make their hearts stop and their jaws drop. I think that’s the intention of most artists. I will never do so. I’m not going to be a writer, I’m an awful artist, I can’t sing, the instrument I play will never draw tears.
Everyone wants to be beautiful, to do something beautiful. To make their mark, contribute to the beauty of the world. Which I suppose makes us all realer than we think. I, for example, think of myself as being both real and fake. The things I do never reflect what’s on the inside, but what’s on the inside could be considered reasonably real.
If I could write myself differently, I would. Knowing that you want to be different and making yourself different are on two completely different levels, however. Everyone wants to be different. There are probably some people who don’t, I guess, but they’ve got it all figured out. Lucky ducks.
Real is a relative term, I guess. It means different things to different people, and sometimes different things to one person. But real is what we all strive for, right? Even when we're fake, we want to fake being real- we try to make our Botox and lipo look real.
The real people are the ones, I guess, who don't try to be anything but what they are.
