My Life as Fiction

I'm going to do some fibbing for a while. Actually, I've already started...

Let me explain.

But before I explain, let me describe two separate events that have led me to make that decision.

Event One: At breakfast this morning, I was reading this week's Newsweek magazine. In the magazine was a little, mini-article that talked about the fact that several "celebrities" on Twitter are not the actual celebrities, but instead are impersonators. The three example people mentioned were Tina Fey, Bill Gates, and Kim Yong Il. They're not really on Twitter, and the people who impersonate them have warped their personalities. For instance, Bill Gates is--as expected--a great big geek, and for whatever reason, the Tina Fey impersonator has made her obsessed with food. I read the article, chuckled, and thought I had forgotten it.

Event Two: I had three cups of coffee this morning after a couple of months of being completely off caffeine. Being the digital citizen that I am, I decided to report this on Twitter (which also updates my Facebook account, by the way, as well as the "My Life as Fiction" in the opposite column on this site), and after doing so, I quickly added two more "tweets" (Hey! That's my first time ever using that word! Don't know if I should feel cool or like a loser!) listing all of the things I thought I was going to do in my caffeine-induced high.

This was a tiny fib. I did feel a little more energetic after the coffee, but I didn't really have a euphoric high. I thought this would just make for a funny string of posts. 

Later, it occurred to me that it would be funny for me to make a post a couple of hours later about how I had crashed and then a couple more hours later make a post about how I had dosed myself with more caffeine in order to overcome the letdown. Neither of which happened. I usually don't crash from caffeine, and I definitely know better than to have caffeine after 2 PM, but again I thought this would make for a couple of funny posts.

And that's when the two events came together for me in a kind of eureka moment: It occurred to me that the three impersonators were writing fiction, and that--ever since the posts about what I was planning to do in my caffeine-induced high--I, too, was writing fiction. And the idea came to me: I could create some new kind of fiction using Twitter and Facebook!

Maybe it really WAS all of that caffeine that was talking, but the idea seemed like a really good idea at the time. Think about it. Why are books "better" than movies? Because in movies, there's really little (if any) room for a person's imagination. 99% of the experience is happening on the movie screen and only a little in the person's imagination. With a book, maybe 70% of the story is happening in the writer's head and the other 30% is being imagined by the reader. Well, with a Twitter/Facebook story, those percentages get shifted even more.

Think about it: You're reading your friends' statuses and one of your friends posts, "Digging through the crafts on a rainy day to have an activity with my 5 yr old and 3 yr old." An hour later there's another post that says, "Why did I think I HAD to answer the phone? Does anyone know how to get finger paint out of curtains and carpet?" In those two, brief posts, an entire story has been told! Only about 1% of what happened is on Facebook, but your brain can fill in the remaining 99% of the story for you. It's the exact opposite of a movie as far as the requirements it puts on the reader to create his own story! Plus, with the Comment features in Facebook and Twitter, this new Twitter/Facebook story is interactive, something you couldn't get in either a movie or a novel. 

So why am I telling you all this? Because I know that some of the readers of this blog also are Facebook friends or are following me on Twitter, and I just want to give you a heads up in the event that you get freaked out by my story, which I plan to "write" over several days, possibly even  about five months or so if the idea works. Also, I want to have this page to send other Facebook/Twitter friends to if THEY get concerned by the events in my story. 

Also, I need to write this to some extent just to help organize this thing myself. I've never written anything large (and by large I mean longer than 10 pages in length) without a detailed outline of the work. Both of my novels--the one I actually wrote and the one I only wrote the first three chapters of--were preceded by about a 20 page detailed, chapter by chapter summary of the events of the story, a list of characters, the back stories of the major characters, etc. Even research papers in college had an outline before I started writing. But I actually started this story before I knew I was even writing it, and so I need to get some things straight in my head.

First of all, I DO have an idea of where this story is going. I don't know what I'm going to write tomorrow, but I can see in my head the general arc of the whole story from beginning to end, and that will help guide me. Second, I have some ground rules that I plan to follow:

• Except on rare occasions, no more than 5 posts a day to the story.  That way visitors to this site who are not Facebook/Twitter subscribers can follow the story each day here.
• All of the characters in the story will be real people in my life. It will be as if the story I am telling is in a parallel universe. "I" will have the same job I have in real life. My kids names will be the same. I will do pretty much the same things. The only difference will be the elements of the story that I am telling.
• Also, other than the aforementioned "My Life as Fiction" section, the Sweasy.net website is NOT part of the story. I will not by lieing here. Well, any more than I already skew the truth to make me look FANTASTIC!

Will all of this even work? I don't know. I know that I run the risk of ticking off some people who won't know that what I write isn't really happening, and I know that the whole concept might turn out to be completely stupid, but now that the idea has come to me, I want to give it a try and see how it works. Who knows? Maybe I will have invented a whole new genre of fiction!

Somebody invented the novel, after all!

Or like I said, maybe it really is the caffeine talking...