ah! my boss, scott, gave me a coffee mug full of good quotations. i’m opening them up judiciously. i thought today deserved another one and i was rewareded:
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” ~ Philip K. Dick
i read it a few times, then read it out loud to my cube neighbor leah and thought about it.
eventually, i realized he pretty much said in thirteen words what i was trying to say in last week’s inaugural fiction friday post, the spring slowly emerged from winter.
here’s my own analysis of that story, wherein i tried in another hundred or two hundred words to say, again, what philip k. dick said in thirteen words:
the story i posted on friday, ‘the spring slowly emerged from winter’ got me thinking on my quiet drive back from stillwater yesterday (still no stereo in my car). it got me thinking about what the story was, why i’d written it, and i discovered i like what it’s about and why i’d written it.
1) the main character is an ordinary man. steve frank is largely recognizable. maybe a little bit more prone to loneliness, but a middle-aged high school teacher, fisherman, beatles’ fan. not that i couldn’t get closer, but it’s the closest i’ve come to an ‘everyman’ so far.
2) the story is simple. there are four acts: heading home and hanging out inside. meditating on the back porch. the car accident. the morning.
3) it’s a horribly exploded idea of all the quiet evenings at home everyone wants to have once in a while (in steve’s case, it seems to be all he wants ever) but which always seem to be intruded upon or interrupted and demand our participation.
4) i really like the basic question of reality. if all reality is based on our perception, why shouldn’t steve be able to imagine a train, it’s lights and sounds and sights, and why shouldn’t that train be able to drown out the sounds of the popularly-accepted reality? the question here is what happens when we move beyond the reality that our imperfect senses create for us and live in our own perfect reality. what happens when personal reality collides with the reality of the masses?
etc. i’ll try not to delve into literary criticism of my own work too often, but all i’m trying to do here is understand and record what it was about that story that i liked so much, and how i can take those ideas and keep playing with them.
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