Stranger than Fiction

January 27th, 2010 by Sara

Last week, while I was driving home, a patch of dense fog materialized on the dark road in front of me. The thing is, it wasn’t a foggy night. I wasn’t near water and there was no dip in the road.  And yet, I could barely see through the white mist in front of me. My mind raced as I drove nearer to it. Was this somehow a super creepy section of road? Had something awful happened here? Where there ghosts?

As I slowed down, my mind pieced the clues together. A large spotlight. A long white trailer. A caution sign. It was a movie set. And I was driving through a patch of fake fog, the movie’s fiction intruding on my reality.

The next day, it happened again. Not fog, but the crossover of fantasy into real life. I’d been at home, watching the tv show, Bones (I can’t resist a good mystery) and then I went to meet my critique group. When I walked into the coffee shop, there was Jack Hodgins, the forensic entomologist, sitting at a table. And the just question popped into my mind before I could stop it…Was I in an episode of Bones? Was a mystery unfolding around me right now? A second later, my brain kicked in and I realized I was being silly. That I lived in LA and it was just the actor, out for coffee with a friend.

Because walking into a fictional world would be ridiculous, right?

Right?

I suspect that the lines between fantasy and reality aren’t as solid as we like to think. That a good story leaks out, like fog across a dark road. As a writer, you might be the one who imagines the characters and put the words down. But once the words are read, that story becomes part of another person’s imagination and then another’s and another’s, spiderwebbing far beyond the edges of the page.

Because who hasn’t felt the back wall of their closet, hoping to get to Narnia. Or squeezed their eyes tight and tried to make something move, hoping to get an invitation to Hogwarts. Or be visited by Obi Wan. When you’re creating new places for readers to inhabit, this overlap can be exciting, and not a little unnerving. Because the power of story is insistent and infectious. It spreads and morphs and grows. And as it does, you realize that the world of words is not quite as safe as you once believed it to be.

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