Alternate
Reality
A weekly blog hop where
Writers share their inspiration.
Join us!
Mostly, I
write about people trying to find their identities because I'm still trying to
find mine. Nearly XX number of years in this skin-bag, in this flesh-mold, and
there's still the occasional dissonance between what's real and what's not, who
I am, who I might have been. Like movement is one nanosecond behind what it
should be.
Sometimes
I trip over a crack in the universe and fall into another dimension.
There! There I am! See how red the bottoms of my shoes are, like I've just come
from a lipstick field, as I sprint to catch a bus that's already pulling away.
Or I'm
sipping a mimosa on the back patio of a that cafe and a bag lady hobbles by,
stench of piss and vomit in her wake. Is
that me? Couldn't be.
Or I walk
through a boutique doorway and catch sight of myself in a mirror. Only it's not
me.
That
elegant, plastic-faced woman with the ethnically-ambiguous husband couldn't
possibly be me.
Only it
is, and not, and maybe still could be.
In
alternate universes, I made different choices. Those choices led to completely
different lives.
When I
see myself in these people, in this way, I give them histories. Backstories, if
you will. This inspires me to reexamine my characters when I come to a point in
the story when their actions ring false.
They come
to me with their stories, but it's my job to figure out how they got to this
state. What the fuck makes them so special? Who do they think they are, trying
to change the world?
The
signal that they're lying is their hesitation, which translates into what some
people call "Writer's Block." They can't tell me what happens next
because they have tripped on the
crack and slipped into another dimension. They've seen what could have been if
they'd made different choices. Or if different choices had been made for them.
Bring
them back to the here and now. Find out why they didn't choose x,y,z to end up in one of those alternate realities.
What they say will show you their motivations. And lessons learned in the past
can illuminate what choice to make in the present.
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