We live in a world where some aspects of truth are not allowed to exist. They live instead behind the pages of books and underneath the skin of imagination. Writing fiction is fun to me because we have the opportunity to play with these elements, mixing and matching reality and daydreams until anything becomes possible within reach of imagination.
Monsters pop in from outer space, people fly, and houses speak to us. But the truth is stranger than fiction and stretches beyond imagination. Nothing we can make up compares to the unusual reality of the kinds of things that actually take place in the real world. You think you’re watching a movie written by a writer who stuttered embellishments in the darkness of his bedroom, fingers tapping against the keyboard while memory plays hide and seek with his thoughts.
But what if his characters really do exist? What if armies of giants live underground with thousand eye locusts like horses ready for battle?
You think Shrek was the genius of a profound imagination until you realize there were talking Donkeys in the history of man. You think The Matrix is just a movie until you begin to understand a parallel universe.
“Truth is Stranger Than Fiction” isn’t just a fancy tagline put together by a writer of fiction. Not something I dug up between the inspirations of Mark Twain. What it seeks to communicate is the notion that nothing we can create can be as unusual as what we are bound to find in real life and speaks metaphorically of the unsettling realness of truth. The “strangeness” of reality. You think something is weird until you find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Perhaps maybe your characters are not just stick men, but what if they actually do exist?
The PBS Blog 