Fantasy and Reality

If you’re a writer like me, you have often enjoyed an active fantasy life. In some ways, as much as your love of reading, your proclivity to daydream, to spend your idle time imagining a life for yourself, was part of your writer’s training. How interesting to arrange the pieces of your world in your mind until it pleases you. In this dreamed life you feel safe or seen, are thriving, desired, and free. Is this not what we’re doing in our stories, arranging scenes and characters so that we and our readers are scared, eager, desirous, or satisfied? Yes and no.

Because if you are also like me, you have no doubt noticed the difference between a story idea as it tumbles and takes a formative shape in your mind, and what happens to that very same idea when you bring it to the blank page. It changes as we write it, as we find all the details necessary to tell it completely. What we write is richer, is more surprising, more original than what we only imagined. I simply cannot replicate the fullness of a written story in the formless but lively nuclear reactor of my mind.

The imagined story is a fantasy; the written story is the reality. Reality beats fantasy every time. There is an obvious relationship between the two, between the dream as it arrives to us and its eventual expression. There is also a freedom to fantasy, to knowing anything is possible, that we can picture our suffering relieved, or feel the excitement and joy of possibility. But as a creative person, I must recognize and remember the difference, must avoid mistaking one for the other.

This is true also when I’m not writing. The future is fantasy; the present is reality. The future is my outline; the present is the sentence I’m finding right now. I have tried to live in the future, in the life I believed I wanted. I have lived long enough now to have learned that I didn’t actually know what I wanted once upon a time. I have instead discovered what I wanted the way I discover a story’s ending. I cannot, it turns out, actually imagine how rich and full life is, I can only live it in the here and now.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com