Things Readers and Writers Love with Shannon Muir

Wisps of Writing Wisdom: Life Lessons March 14, 2012

These last couple weeks have been filled with a lot of the unexpected. As I said last Wednesday, when other people intersect with your world you have to try to be careful what lines you cross and this is a case – especially because it’s evolving – I really can’t say much. I will say that it’s definitely made me look at the world in different ways.

As writers, we can create new and fantastical places, or we can take the “ordinary world” and make it something more than regular. We can take what we understand as being what is and create for better or worse the universe as it might be. Yet, sometimes, things can happen to us or we can become spectators to events that show that life is more than we imagined it to be. I often think there is a lot of substance to that idea of “truth can be stranger than fiction,” because I believe we can only imagine to a certain degree based on the boundaries of our experiences; when something enters our lives that shows far beyond what we knew or what we’ve read or viewed (in the case of TV or movies) by anyone else, then our definitions of truth and fiction are changed. I think these experiences can be just as true to readers as to writers in terms of how media can constantly re-define the universe.

I know from my own recent experiences that my perspective on things has undergone some definition and transformation, experience I am always glad to have to grow and improve as a writer and a person.