Is all writing autobiographical? If it is, then by all accounts, I must lead a very exciting life. For I have written about a pedophile, a murderer, a man with Alzheimer’s, a cheating wife, a cheating husband, a random peccadillo, a hijacker, a space and time traveller and numerous other things that I couldn’t possibly have experienced in one lifetime.
As a writer, of course you put bits of yourself and your impressions and experiences into what you write. But above all else, it is the ability to imagine, and to create an alternate reality, a world of what-if’s and what-could-have-been’s that delineates the real from the imagined.
So, if you see what you think is a slice of my life on paper, or, in this instance, on screen, rest assured it is a very jazzed up version. Like a cheesecake, I am merely the digestive crumble at the bottom. The rest of the cake is layers and layers of fiction dolloped with the cream of fantasy.
