1/5/2024
It’s Fiction, Dammit!
This is number ninety-four in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
NO, THAT’S NOT the frustrated cry of an author whose fans believe he must be the most oversexed 75-year-old in the world. Nor whose sister believes every time she reads something that sounds familiar that the story must be about our family. Yes, I’ll remind both that it’s fiction, not an autobiography!
But if it’s not that, what is it?
It’s what I constantly remind myself when the details are getting too gritty and real. It’s what I tell myself when I see a person on the street and nearly call out to her because she looks exactly like Whitney in the Model Student series. Or when I finally think of a snappy comeback to what another person said three days ago.
It’s just a story. Characters I made up in my head. A paragraph I can edit later. Something I once saw that would make a great backdrop for a scene I’m writing. It’s fiction, damn it!
I had not yet started my peripatetic writing days when I wrote Nathan Everett’s The Volunteer. I bring it up because the first week of January is typically when amateur census-takers will hit the streets overnight to see how many homeless are really in the streets and in shelters in January. The answer will be painful. Despite our best efforts to assist indigent people, provide food and shelter, provide drug and alcohol abuse rehab, and display wonderful slogans on placards during parades, the number continues to grow year after year.
Nor is it generally populated by immigrants (documented or not). Teens, veterans, Native Americans, and others populate both the sheltered and unsheltered homeless population. I decided to try to get inside the mind of a chronically homeless man, to tell his story, and to explore the issues he dealt with. He would never be permanently sheltered and there were many reasons.
Upon reading the book, my older sister accosted me with the words, “You must have had a different father than I did. The father in that book was nothing like my father.”
It’s fiction, damn it! Yes, there were characteristics of the time, the places, and people we knew in the story. But it wasn’t our father!
So, if the story was fiction, why tell such a hopeless story?
Because it needed to be told. I needed to be honest about the situation, even though the characters were fictional. People needed to hear the stories of the homeless and not have their consciences assuaged by a happy ending. “And then he fell in love, got a job, and lived happily ever after.” Problem solved. That’s a different branch of fiction called fantasy. The story wasn’t supposed to make the reader feel good.
The Volunteer eBook is available on Bookapy and online as a paperback.
In my current work in progress, Soulmates, which is posting in pre-release for my Sneak Peek Patrons on Patreon, I have a character who is an author. She believes the voices she hears in her head are characters she made up, not the communications of real, live people.
In her creative writing class, she asks the teacher, “Ms. Dorn, is it normal for an author to… believe in her characters?” The answer came straight from my journals.
“In his journal, author Ash Mann once stated that the people in his head were often more real than the people he met in person. I don’t know that I’d call that ‘normal,’ though,” Ms. Dorn concluded.
I had to think up a new alias for quoting myself! I don’t think you’ll see that one anywhere else I write.
The point is, imagination is an incredibly powerful force in our lives, and in my life especially. I have ‘reference material’ for most things I write: a picture I saw, a person I met, a place I visited, a fantasy I had. But once that is planted in my imagination, what emerges is often as surprising and usually pleasant to me as it is to my readers.
Not everything is pleasant. I thought once that I would dabble with a mind control story, only the twist in my story is that the woman was controlling her mind and possibly that of others. She truly had a split personality and considered the command voice in her head to be someone outside herself.
I did some research as I always do before beginning a story and came across a phenomenon called ‘unintended anesthetic awareness’ (UAA). Yes, that is where the anesthesia in an operation paralyzes the patient so she is unable to respond or speak, but leaves her feeling every bit of pain and hearing all the conversation. Yikes!
I wrote the story, thinking it would be a psychological thriller. It turned out to be a horror story I couldn’t believe I’d written. I even gave it to my ex-wife to read, thinking this might be a cross-over to a Nathan Everett story instead of a Devon Layne story. She eagerly opened the file.
Fifteen minutes later she deleted the file from her computer and said to me, “I can’t read past the first chapter and I’m never going to a hospital again!”
It remains the only story I actually deleted from my SOL story site!
Had I ever experienced UAA? No! And I hope I never do. I was partially aware during a routine procedure just before Christmas and was able to tell the doctor a couple of things I recalled. I could hear their voices and laughter. I thought there was something about skiing involved, but I didn’t have my hearing aids in. And I could tell how far the probe in my ass had progressed. It wasn’t painful, but I knew it was happening.
I read testimonials from people who experienced UAA and how utterly horrifying and agonizing it was. From that, I built a sufficiently traumatic event to split the personality of the woman who found herself utterly unable to resist the commands she received in her mind—actually from herself.
Maybe one day I will revisit the story with a clearer intent in my mind and either embrace or reduce the horror of the original first few chapters. Could this be a 2025 project? Perhaps.
I live and, to some extent, record my experiences for future writing projects. I meet people and think, ‘Oh, he’s just like character XYZ.’ But often that character is influencing my view of the person more than the person is influencing my view of the character.
I have a few very good friends, and many friends. But I count among my many friends some of the characters I’ve written. J. Wesley Allen, Brian Frost, Nate Hart, Jacob Hopkins, Dennis Enders, Raimie Bell, Bob the Demon. They are all very real to me, and during the writing of their stories, we talked extensively.
I remind myself frequently: It’s fiction, dammit!
If I’m writing fiction, why do I write things that are so based in actual events and issues: Vietnam, AI, writing, dying detectives, violent death, transsexuals, the homeless? It’s a bit of a contradiction in terms, but I’ll include as my next post “The Moral Obligation of Fiction—Even Erotica.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
