Escape

There’s a reason we write what we do. I believe I’ve said that before, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I think it becomes more interesting, still, when you consider that we write for the same reason Michael Bay’s Transformers series does so well in the box office or games like Halo and Call of Duty sells billions and billions of copies: we want to escape.

I’m not talking about a quality of life, or of depressing matters like the ailing economy or the rising threat of nuclear holocaust. Not today. What we escape from is the mundane. The normal. We write, we watch, we read, not for entertainment, but because we wish.

We wish it could be us saving the world.

We wish it could be us falling madly, deeply in love with the man/woman of our dreams.

We wish we had the chance to be millionaires, to see exotic locales and drive cars whose names we can’t pronounce without pinching our tongues.

More than anything, we wish this relatively boring life weren’t ours. And, even if we do, if we could take a moment, a day, a week, to do something else, to run naked through the forests of the Amazon, to battle an endless horde of demons and goblins to protect the King, to set off on a journey the likes of which has never been seen before, we would.

If fate turned her ugly head toward us and drew us along on an epic quest, we would listen to her Siren song willingly and become entranced in her wake.

Each of my characters is a reflection of myself, whether man, woman or child. Each represents the tiniest fraction of my persona, and each carves their own journey through the fictional landscape of my mind. For some, their journeys will be short. For others, there is no end. Yet they will each leave their mark, creating a lasting impression on their world, on me and, hopefully, one day, on you.

But the reason they do so, for me at least, is precisely that: they’re me, taking paths unheard and unexplored, exploring that which I cannot, going places I have only ever dreamed of and will likely never have the chance to visit. They do what I, in my decidedly normal life of corporate servitude and domestic peace, will never have to.

In that light, I just came up with another story idea. Focused on a job I will never, ever (probably) do on my own. It’s insane, the world of possibilities open to us at any given moment, with an idea flowing to you even while taking a brief facilities break.

I’m going to go write it down.