An epic-fantasy computer game which The Missus and I play every now and then lets your character acquire any of a variety of cool, vaguely medieval-magic weapons. One property which some of these weapons have is called “vampiric regeneration”; while I’m hazy on the details, I think this means (for example) that if you shoot an opponent with an arrow of vampiric regeneration, his or her strength goes down and your own goes up.
Which, in a roundabout sort of way, is the theme of this post.
If you’re a writer, you’ve probably seen a bumper sticker or shirt which reads, “Careful, or you’ll end up in my novel.” Maybe somebody who worries about that prospect has given you one.
(And maybe you’ve repaid them by doing just that, you vindictive little sneak.)
I don’t know, though. Unless you’re doing non-fiction (or more or less non-fictional “memoir”), putting real people in your work not only risks getting first-hand lessons about libel or defamation; it also is just duller than making up your own characters.
Okay, at some level you can’t help “creating” characters who resemble real people — some (most?) of them people you don’t even know. Say you’re sitting in an airport bar, absolutely savoring the interminable freaking wait for your plane’s spare part to be FedExed from Bangalore and feeling murderous about the world in general. Suddenly on the other end of the bar some horse’s ass breaks into song and you realize: He’s singing along with the commercial jingle on the bar TV. At the top of his lungs. You notice that his hairline is receding almost to the point that it’s simpler to say his head is ballooning, and that he’s blinkingblinkingblinking the optical semaphore which says, repeatedly, New contact lenses at work. Mentally you turn back the clock to view this yoyo at age 16. You take pleasure in giving him some grotesque skin condition. You invent a bully who’s tormented him since first grade and is now the student-government president, assigning him menial tasks at pep rallies (like mopping up the gym floor after the sweating masses have left). You picture his first kiss, with the Homecoming Queen at that — or rather, with the Homecoming Queen’s yearbook picture.
Yeah. That’ll show him. That’ll teach him to have been interesting, here and now, to you, a writer armed with the deadliest of weapons: a vampiric imagination.
Not that I know anybody like that guy myself, of course. And if I did, not that I’d ever reward such a flaming idiot by committing his picture to the Web’s permanent page. No. (No.)
