Someone recently read one of my books, then called me on the telephone wanting to know if the central character in the book was OK. The book didn't have an unhappy ending, but the reader was still concerned about what happened to him. Is he still alive? Did he go home and marry the woman he met in the story I'd written? What about the little boy? At first, I thought he didn't understand the story, but after a few moments it dawned on me that he thought the story was about a real life event. "It's fiction," I said. "I just made it up."
He was disappointed, and perhaps it shouldn't have, but that pleased me. He bought into my characters to the point they became real to him. The story was so real to him that he thought it really happened, and that left me wondering if I should point out right up front that the story is pure fiction. Would that spoil the story for the reader, make it less interesting for them? I just assumed that the reader would automatically know that, but what this particular reader said started me thinking about some things relating to fiction literature. My books are fiction, yes, but they are usually not highly fantastic. I write them with reality in mind. It's like I'm saying, "This didn't happen, but it sure could have."
The story in question here is called The Christmas Cowboy, and it's about an ageing saddle bronc rider making his last trip to the National Finals Rodeo. He's been a world champion in the past, but his best days are behind him and he comes to the finals nursing a bad leg. And then he meets a small child at a burn center, a remarkable little boy, and that changes him. It's not a novel story. In fact, I crafted the story back in the mid 1980s from a real life situation about a baseball player who connected with a youngster battling cancer. I saw him on television talking about how working with the kid changed him, made him realize that what he did as a baseball player was insignificant compared to what the child was up against. We've all been inspired by things like that . . . not that profound, perhaps, but at some level.
The man who called to ask about this book character, thinking he was real, is one of those inspirational characters himself. He's in a wheelchair due to a sniper's bullet back during the Vietnam war, and I've been witness to his struggle with that for the past ten years. He's a good craftsman, makes hunting knives, but he doesn't read much. His wife bought my book as a Christmas present for him, thinking he'd read it simply because I wrote it. He's listened to some of my rodeo stories before because we've had long conversations in the past. I'm delighted that he's reading the book, and I've got some presents for him myself. I don't know why I didn't think about him earlier, but in a week or two I'll drop by to see him with an armload of books. And we'll talk about fiction literature some, and I'll point out to him that even if the story is fiction, it's still real. It becomes real when you read something you connect with, and people connect with stories for different reasons. My friend knows what it's like to overcome difficult circumstances, and I've written a number of stories about situations like that. Maybe the characters in my stories are fictitious, but the situations there are most definitely real things in the lives of many people.
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