Stranger Than Fiction: What If My Characters Weren’t Characters at All!?!

There’s this movie with Will Ferrell called Stranger Than Fiction.

I’d say it’s really good for a Will Ferrell movie except that it’s really good for any movie.

Plot, characters, acting, opportunities for introspection: This film has it all. And it’s original too! As far as I know, anyway.

The storyline follows Harold Crick, a thirty-something IRS agent who leads the most monotonous life ever until he’s assigned to Ana Pascal, a bakery-store owner who’s intentionally not filed her taxes properly for years. Naturally, the unlikely pair falls in love, but that’s not why Stranger Than Fiction is so brilliant.

It’s brilliant because of the backstory, which follows Karen Eiffel, a famous novelist who always kills her main characters off at the end of her books. And this time around, her main character is Harold Crick. Only she doesn’t know she’s writing about a real live person.

I own the movie. It’s good enough to watch repeatedly. But it always makes me wonder…

What if my characters were real?

When Karen Eiffel learns that she’s been essentially murdering real people – that she’s a serial killer – she’s horrified. As well she should be. And while I don’t normally kill off the good guys (if she was reading this, my darling mother would point out – with a disapproving air – the three exceptions to that rule), I do a lot of other horrid things to them.

I mean, in the Faerietales series, Sabrina gets terrorized mentally, emotionally, physically, psychologically… and by multiple characters. If some poor young woman was really chained to an evil shrink’s couch being questioned at the end of an electric baton because I dictated it?

Than, pretty much, I’m a horrible human being.

The same applies to Kayla in the Dirty Politics series. Evans brought some of the torture on himself, but I still gave him a rotten backstory to explain why he went rogue. (I’m so sorry, Sarah!) And I’ll even admit I’d feel bad for putting Rod through what I did. It’s amusing if he’s just fictional; not so much if he was an actual human being.

When it comes to my historical and Christian fiction stories, I did some serious research for those two. They’re based off of too much verifiable documentation for me to blame my imagination.

But as for my fantasy and political thrillers? Well, I would like to take this moment to express my most sincere hope that reality really isn’t stranger than fiction.