Living in a fictional world

 

The Old Neighborhood Grill
a very real place in Kelly O'Connell's 
fictional world

“Life is real, life is earnest/Dust thou art, to dust returnest.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sometimes had a dour outlook on life, but his words too often ring true. Real life is sometimes earnest and complicated and difficult—and you want to find an escape a place to hide. Readers and authors have such a place—the alternate worlds created in fiction.

On the listserv of Guppies, (stands for Going to be Published, the international electronic chapter of Sisters in Crime), a well-published author recently lamented that she was writing the last book in a series, and it made her sad because she hated to leave the people and the world she had created. Others chimed in, some saying they worried about the future of characters they’d come to love. Someone else assured that it's okay if you leave the characters in a good place with positive outcomes ahead for their lives. Even if you have to write it only for yourself, you may want to have those characters find the job they have yearned for, marry, have children, take a cruise. Whatever would make their lives happy.

I can testify to that. In my Kelly O’Connell Mysteries (my very first mystery and first series), I created a world built around the neighborhoods I know—Berkeley and Fairmount in Fort Worth—with landmarks such as Lily B. Clayton Elementary, The Old Neighborhood Grill, Lili’s Bistro, and lots of the Craftsman houses that dot Fairmount. And I peopled it with characters I could like—Kelly, whose a single mom (one of my daughters said it was a  highly autobiographical novel), Mike Shandy, her policeman love interest, Keisha, her girl Friday who has the sixth sense and is irrepressible.

Perhaps the greatest compliment I ever had as a writer is that those people were someone you would meet in your local grocery store. And one reader wrote that she thought she saw Kelly going into the Old Neighborhood Grill. Those comments meant, to me, that I had succeeded in creating a believable world.

The Kelly O’Connell series ended a few years ago. I had felt it winding down, partly because I let Kelly’s daughters, who were essential to many of the stories, age out. But still today, sometimes my mind wanders back to Kelly and I think of a plot hook that might work. The woman who “saw” Kelly going into the local restaurant still occasionally posts, “I miss Kelly.”

I’ve moved on to other series, other characters, and perhaps that part of the writing life—learning to let go when it’s time. Somehow, there are lessons there for us in daily life, though I’m not sure how to put them together—but having fictional worlds, if only in your daydreams, is not a bad thing. But there’s also a point at which you have to let them go and face reality. Maybe all of that is where the label “escape reading” came from. I admit tht a lot of time I think my mysteries are escape reading.

One of the things I keep reading about is what kind of footprint we each want to leave on the earth—not just our environmental footprint, but for what do we want to be known? I’ve long felt it important to contribute to the world in some way, but I am not a firefighter rushing into burning buildings (guess what’s on the TV in the background as I write) or a physician, saving lives, or even a teacher, helping to spread knowledge. I write for people’s amusement.

I have a friend, a much better and more popular novelist than I am, who tells me to banish such thoughts. By providing escape and entertainment and maybe a bit of enlightenment, I am improving the quality of some lives. I hope it’s true. I hope the fictional worlds of Kelly O’Connell or Kate Chamber in the Blue Plate Murders series or even wacky Irene in my current series carry readers away from the earnestness of their daily lives into a fictional world where, for some time, however short, they are free and happy and safe.

Speaking of making a contribution to the world—and of neighborhood institutions, I can’t help loudly cheering for the surgical team at Fort Worth’s Cook Children’s Hospital who today, in a first for the hospital, successfully separated cojoined twins. The baby girls are only a few months old and are tonight doing well. What a wonderful milestone. I’m in awe, but I also couldn’t help wondering if this provided a moral dilemma for the pro-lifers. If every life is God’s creation and sacrosanct, then perhaps God meant those babies to be forever joined, and surgeons were going against God’s will by separating them. I don’t for a moment believe any of that, but I can’t help wondering what the extremists among us think.[

Meantime, blessings on those babies and their parents who tonight must be enormously relieved. And thanks be to God for skilled surgeons—and fictional worlds.