The Character I Have Created

My writing tends to be about subjects that I am not a big believer in, which I find kind of weird. For example, the Caleb Devin Chronicles is about a space alien taking over the Earth. I do not believe that there are space aliens coming to take over the Earth, but yet I write about them.

Writers are actors who use a different stage

The next book series I am starting mixes science fiction with religious mythology. While I love science fiction, I am not a religious person. But I still find religious subjects fascinating, and I never seem to run out of ways to twist Christianity to meet my plot device needs.

It also seems to me that the more adamant I am against a subject, the more I enjoy writing about it. I absolutely dismiss the idea that we have ever been visited by space aliens, and I won't be waiting by the television any time soon to watch the big invasion of Earth on CNN. I simply do not believe in space aliens. However, I have a long list of space alien-based stories I will be writing in the future that I am excited about.

When I kind of step outside myself for a little while and examine the way I write, I am able to see that the author in me is a character I have created. The author in me is interested in topics that hold no interest for me under any other circumstances at all. It is the author in me that asks the "what if" questions and always comes back with answers that have to do with space aliens, monsters, demons, angels and holy wars. It could also be that those topics are just cool to write about. 

If you have ever considered writing a story, then remember to open up your mind and be prepared to write the coolest stories ever about things you would normally have no interest in. I think that some of the best writers are different people when they sit down to write stories. Good writers are actually playing a character they created when they write. Is Stephen King really that creepy and spooky in real life? When we saw him do a live reading on the campus of Harvard University, he did not seem that way.

The ability to be someone else and write from a different perspective is one of the biggest attractions for fiction writers. Biographers and non-fiction writers like to deal in facts and get obsessed with presenting information exactly as it is found. I don't think that biographers have that author character they play when they sit down to write. Biographers and non-fiction writers seem to me to be very straightforward people, which goes with the territory.

Fiction writers in any genre tend to adopt an author character that will write about many things that the writer would normally want nothing to do with. Some fiction writers have several author characters they play, which strikes me as confusing. I play one author character and it is a character that is completely different from my real personality. That is one of the many things that makes writing fiction so much fun,