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2/24/11

Writing: Fact and Fiction

Much of life is like fiction...

If there is anything I can say about my somewhat routine life, it is not boring, rather it's quite interesting most days. Not always in a way I care for but most of the time at least one interesting thing happens, I learn something new or a connect-the-dots moment occurs and mostly it's enriching. Sometimes all of that happens, when it does it's usually at my humble job, which I'm just fine with because it is the most likely place for an engaging event to happen. Almost always it involves the carousal of people that cross over the threshold. Not the predictable ones but those that dare to live in the pale of what many consider "irregular."

I do think it's in the way you approach and perceive your daily life. It is what you make of it. I notice things and have a keen perception of what many people, even seemingly unpredictable ones, are likely to do. It's a highly honed sense developed from a lifetime of people watching and interaction with a variety of souls from all walks of life. I think it's important to absorb that and turn it into something useful. For me it manifests itself in two ways, the first is I learn how to understand and interact with a cornucopia of human behaviors. That enriches me and as well as other people if they have something that I can help them figure out. A two-way interaction.

The second is I jot a lot of it down in bits and pieces. I would hardly call this note-taking a journal or a diary, merely a memory jogger. It's because in order for me to wrap my head around the still-cryptic-to-me world around me, having never really been regular enough to resolve the perplexities of life, I make sense of it by creatively expressing myself. Out of the second thing I do, jotting down ideas that come from experiencing life, I turn into writing. When I was younger I turned these notes and sliced them into fiction stories. In the past few decades I would use them as examples in the non-fiction I was writing. Nowadays I've rediscovered fiction writing and these memory joggers are spliced into parts of short stories.

There is truth that much of life is like fiction and that fiction is a lot like life; which is not so strange as we think.