Brains don't know the difference between a true memory and a scene we vividly imagine, so somewhere in the recesses of my mind I half-way believe that woman whose salad was stolen has offed a fat co-worker, who always claimed he never ate anything for lunch except a fifty-calorie health bar. When found, the salad-thief had bleu cheese dressing on his cold lips. I imagine her headed for life in prison, and I see her husband and children weeping and asking, “Why, why, why couldn't you just let him have the freaking salad?”
It's unsettling enough that mystery writers tend to blur the line between the real and the imaginary, but it gets downright bizarre when imaginary stories occur later in real life. I once wrote a story in which a box of cocaine was secretly loaded onto an Air Force cargo plane by a ground crewman at a Central American air base. The plane flew to an Air Force base in the U.S., where an accomplice removed the cocaine and delivered it to a big-time drug dealer. A couple of weeks after I wrote the scenes, somebody was arrested for doing exactly what I'd described. I wasn't psychic, I'd just taken available information, spun it, and come up with a highly possible scenario. Tom Clancy did the same thing when he wrote a novel in which a plane was deliberately flown into the White House.
The positive side of having a mystery writer's imagination is that fiction writers almost never commit crimes themselves. With very few exceptions, people who write about murder and horror are fairly mild-mannered, law-abiding people. Even if we had intentions of carrying out some heinous deed, we'd probably keep putting it off until we'd finished a chapter or a book or a series, or started another one, and by then we'd have forgotten about it.
However, writing that last paragraph has made me begin to imagine a plot in which a very popular writer starts planning to kill somebody. I think it will be a comedy.
Blaize Clement is the author of the Dixie Hemingway Mystery Series.
“Brains don’t know the difference between a true memory and a scene we vividly imagine”
I didn’t know that. No wonder my life is so confused. I spend half my time trying to remember stuff in my real life, while plot points dance merrily in my head. Then when I am trying to structure a story, I keep thinking that I have to call the dentist and get the oil changed in my car.
Fun post about rampageous writerly imagination!
I was reading your first Dixie Hemingway book in the Phoenix Airport a few years ago, when I was accosted by a youngish man claiming to be your son and thrilled to pieces to see his mom’s book read in an airport. That’s the sort of thing one reads about in books, but seldom experiences in real life.
I’m looking forward to your next book.
Thnaks for Shaering it