by Hugo Reed

Created on: July 17, 2008

As it was mentioned within an earlier article, fiction writers are all liars. However, the view upon writing fiction depends upon the writer's own mind. In my opinion it matters a very great deal weather or not you can feel the characters. As a professional-level fantasy writer, I have always put so much life into my characters that if I torture or kill them off (which seems to happen an awful lot in my stories, I'm sad to say) then tears physically come to my eyes.

A fiction writer must love his or her character so much that they must achieve complete empathy with their creation. This is why so many writer's appear "crazy" to the wide population of the world. In reality you would be hard-pushed to find a more determined group of people then writers. As I have already explained, a true writer must love, grow and breathe their own creations. So killing off anyone within the story, even the villain of the piece, hurts a lot.

This hurt is so real to the writer that they will weep for and with the character. J.K. Rowling was "caught crying" about the death of a Sirius Black in the fifth installment in her Harry Potter series. A lot of people in the world were shocked at this and kept saying that she must be deep to feel that pain. If she was honest, and truly connected to her book, it would've been so true to her that she cried after every single book. However, not all the pain writer's go through is their own fault.

In the beginning of your writing career people are less then polite about your amateur mistakes. So to even get to the level where you hurt from killing the characters, you have to go through a lot of emotional pain from the world. So, when you go through so much pain within a profession, and when it's all so real that you go "insane" from the pain of what you killed, do you really think that ever fiction writer thinks they are a liar?

Let me tell you, as a fiction writer (and one who was already partially insane to begin with) I am greatly offended by the fact that people seem to think being insane is a bad thing. If I were not insane I couldn't do my job. However does this mean I and all other fiction writers consider themselves liars?

On the surface they know it. However, deep down, in places like the heart, I don't think a single true fiction writer hasn't been brought into the world of their own stories. That's the most important part of the thing is that you work really hard to drag yourself into the world, and when you reach that point, when it's so real to you that the physical world around you is replaced with the world you created from paper and printer's ink, then you tell me if I'm still a liar.

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