Things Made Up And Written Down

“This isn’t the beginning of the story, but it’s a good enough place to start.”

“I promise to tell the truth, the half-truth, and nothing like the truth.”

– The Author

Disillusioned with his life, job and a dreary commute, a middle-aged man begins to wonder what happened to his childhood dreams and where it all went wrong. He begins to have imaginary conversations with himself age seven, fourteen and twenty-one to find out why.

Resolving to put things right and become the writer he once aspired to be, he goes through displacement activities to avoid writing, then has a breakthrough, deliberately writing badly and breaking all the rules of writing just to write something. With all this out of his system, he settles down to begin a “proper” short story.

As his first efforts falter, he starts to use creative writing techniques to get going, but things take an unexpected turn when characters unrelated to his stories turn up of their own accord in the real world. The more he writes, the more he finds the boundary between fiction and reality distorted. He has an idea for a full-length novel and is making good progress until an earlier character comes along to steal the manuscript at gunpoint.

He starts a new piece, but with the blurring of reality it is not clear if he is writing about himself or it is a new story. Finding himself in 1911, with all of his modern day possessions turned into their period equivalents, he goes in search of H.G. Wells, author of The Time Machine, to get advice.

Things Made Up And Written Down is available from Amazon as well as other online retailers.