"Painted Desert Spiral, Arizona" (c) 2011 Stu Jenks
Things I'm learning by writing fiction instead of memoirs:
1) I don't risk giving too-much-information about my own personal life. My life is only a single life and not everyone needs to know the details.
2) I don't risk hurting the feelings of others, as I might writing memoirs. I'm now creating the lives of brand new people.
3) I can talk about ideas and emotions that are meaningful to me without have myself or people I know in real life say them. Instead, my characters speak these thoughts and feelings, in far more compelling ways than I can say them.
4) I get to express an ever rising spiral of emotions, actions, and thoughts, through characters who, at times, seem as alive as the friends who I have coffee with. These characters act in wonderous or monsterous ways. They love fully or not at all. They think of others first or selfishly only of themselves. And all the greys inbetween.
5) And lastly, writing fiction is a scariest yet most exciting creative thing I've done, since I discovered that Zippo lighters make great light sources.
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