Know Jack #490 Madness

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”     Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote

I think Cervantes’ hero would agree that writing fiction requires a special kind of sanity found only in what normal people deem madness. Upon the solid ground of real-life mathematics, multiplying two negatives produces a positive. Fiction writers carry that idea further.

They take a practical cardinal rule of the craft that advises writers to “write what you know” and research the practical workings of life until they see life and the world clearly. They search out the flora and fauna, geography, local customs and dialects, and make all those things agree with a certain time period.

Why seek such overdone practicality? Writers do it to tell a convincing lie. A lie that they “see” as clearly as the physical world they have studied. A lie they hope to sell to the practical souls wanting to escape reality. Studying the truth to tell a lie has got to be a form of madness exceeded by expecting to turn a profit doing so.

Though they have been advised otherwise, writers only surrender their dreams to paper. Everyone knows that a person can’t make a living listening to the voices in their head. Writers know it too. They simply choose not to believe it, or if they do believe it, they refuse to accept it as true. At least that is how it should begin

Should lightning strike with financial success, dreams of writing can become a mundane pursuit of the successful life. The voices within are drowned by voices without. The world that is and the world of dreams become the same, resulting in too much sanity.

I’ve heard that all fiction boils down to only two stories. Someone new comes to town, or someone goes on a journey. Seeing how either changes the world, remaking the world as it should is madness indeed.

In any case, only seeing the world as it is in the beginning is madness. To be a life worth living, even a fictional one, needs to surprise us with twists and turns.