THE HEART OF THE MATTER
I came across an article on CNN written by Michael Connelly, a very well known mystery writer. His latest novel is called "Nine Dragons." The plot is about the disappearance of his daughter in Hong Kong. She vanishes while in a semi-notorious area of Kowloon called Chungking Mansions, a maze of guesthouses and business offices ranging over 5 blocks of 17-story buildings.
Right away that caught my attention because I am using the same plot device to open and close my novel. I was thinking how weird that was, kind of, but then things got really strange as I read further.
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Turns out that at the exact same time that Connelly was in Hong Kong gathering background — you can tell that he and I operate at slightly different levels — there was a real-life disappearance of a young woman, a 31-year old Canadian tourist named Ani Ashekian.
The article in CNN goes on to describe how Connelly came to discover the linkage and Connelly's attempts to find some trace of Ms. Ashekian in film footage that had been shot while he was there. Unfortunately, life does not provide the neat little plot revelations that fiction does and his efforts were for naught.
What interested me was how the line between reality and fiction can become blurred, not just in the physical circumstances of plot but in the emotional umbra that these events cast on the reader and the writer. If you are writing about a daughter disappearing, then any similar disappearance adds to the emotional density of your writing.
I am beginning to see that writing is a bit like acting. The more you can put yourself into the emotional lives of your characters, the better your writing will be. The down side is that these feelings can sometimes seep into who you are, blurring the line between the creation and the creator.
October 31, 2009
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