Dramatize…

So a week ago on Storytellers Unplugged, John Rosenman posted an amusing anecdote about a trip the podiatrist.  I shan’t summarize here…I wouldn’t do it justice.  Go read it for a laugh.  At the end he posed the question “Do we (writers) dramatize our lives and ourselves more than others?” That’s a tough call.  From the series of writers’ blogs I read, I would have to say yes, probably.  We talk to our characters as if they are real people.  We find inspiration in the oddest of places.  And I think, for most of us, our imaginations are always on the go, creating and spinning threads of stories to alleviate the doldrums of “regular life”.  Or it may be that everyone does it and writers are more apt to admit it.  Who knows?

I know that I absolutely tend to dramatize life.  See, my real everyday existence simply is not all that exciting.  My mother calls daily asking “any news?”  Usually there isn’t.  I very much lead a sort of routine existence.  Wake up, walk dogs, shower, eat breakfast, go to work, come home for lunch, go back to work, come home, fix dinner, walk dogs, hang with hubby, deal with job number two of online teaching–and in the middle of all try to read and write.  Weekends are catching up on household stuff–laundry, chores, more dog walks–and the occasional social event with friends.  This is not an exciting life.  Mostly I’m okay with that–excitement often means drama, and while I enjoy the heck out of some TV or fictional drama…I’m not so keen on it in real life.  But since it is not an exciting life, there are often stretches of supreme boredom: cleaning house, standing in line at Walmart (most especially then), watering plants, sitting in staff meetings–my brain tends to go off on tangents that would make Ally McBeal proud.

Sometimes I’ll be envisioning my current WIP playing out before my eyes.  Occasionally I’ll be standing there having a mental conversation with one of my characters of the same ilk Brett Battles described over on Murderati the other day.  Sometimes I imagine I’m someone else with superpowers or some paranormal trait.  That jackass who just cut me off in traffic–I totally shot heat vision from my eyes at his tires–they just missed…   I can’t count the times I sat in class in grad school envisioning a hostage situation from which yours truly rescued the entire class with some mad martial arts skills I don’t begin to legitimately possess.  I have, on occasion, been accused of (and admitted to) preferring fictional worlds over my own.  I tend to find my characters (or those of other people in the books I read) far more interesting than real life.  Certainly more so than my day jobs or the dull family dramas in which I often find myself embroiled.  Does this contribute to my tendency to go walkabout in my mind?  Sure it does.  Do I feel bad about it?  Not a bit.  I think it’s a human tendency to mentally star as the hero or heroine in our own lives–but I think maybe writers have more interesting fantasies than the average Joe.  And we’re more likely to bring our fantasies into some sort of fruition.