LIfe Reflected In Art

During the past week I have read several posts from writers about how anger they thought they'd dealt with, buried, or forgotten surfaces surprisingly in their work. Not naming the writers, but their comments made me think about our subconscious and the fodder for our stories. I believe my historicals came about from stories my father [in his fifties when I was born] and maternal grandmother [sixties when I was born] told about their childhoods and incited my interest in history. But I hadn't considered that characters might sometimes grow out of frustrations with family members. Sure, I knew writers killed off in print people they hated--one of the cathatrtic joys of writing. I hadn't thought of other characters as manifestations of our frustrations or desires. One writer mentioned a sociopath mother who had humiliated and tormented her childhood. Not until she was editing a work did she realize the heroine's mom was based on her own, right down to an event she'd included. That made me realize that a hero in one of my books was based on my constant hope for a family member--that he will see the error of his ways and reform for the love of a good woman. Consciously, I know he won't and that he's looking for and finding the other kind of woman, is always going to be a self-absorbed con, and believes the only crime is getting caught. Subconsciously, I reinvented him and made him end up a much nicer guy--a hero who deserved the heroine. A friend whose last book was edgier than any of her others admitted that it was because of all she went through when her mother was ill and dying while my friend was writing the book. As writers and as humans, we are the sum of our experiences, both good and bad.

It reminds me of a quote about television in the forties and fifties, and films in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Nick Clooney [brother of singer Rosemary] said, "People wanted to see life, not as it was, but as they wished it could be." I suppose the same is true for readers of popular fiction. And for writers of the same. We write not so much as life is, but as we wish it could be. For every heartache, a healing. For every good person, victory. For every bad person, redemption or swift and painful retribution. Our lives--and our dreams--are reflected in our art.