Kevin Strange's Blog: Strange Sayings - Posts Tagged "rant"

A lot of authors are obsessed with realism, even when they write fiction, which is, essentially, the art of making shit up for a living. Many authors do meticulous research or draw inspiration from backgrounds that allow them to write socially or scientifically accurate fiction.
My question? Why the fuck are you trying to be accurate about telling made up stories? Because your readers demand that a book about the FBI be as true to the real FBI as possible? Ok, that's fair, I guess. But why don't those readers just read true crime magazines or the newspaper? They are, after all, going in to this thing understanding that the story they're about to read is completely fictional, totally made up. A big ole lie.
Cult author Chuck Palahniuk makes a living describing unusual jobs or hobbies in meticulous detail. He spends more time researching for his books than actually writing them.

Why?

Why not make shit up, since, you know, you're already making shit up. Who gives a shit if there REALLY was a cult that employed all of their members as housekeepers? I certainly don't give a shit, and would never base my enjoyment of entertainment on the historical accuracy of housekeeping.
Telling me about some obscure explosion in Russia that ACTUALLY HAPPENED, MAN! Isn't going to sway me one way or the other about your Russian alien 6 book saga. Either it's going to be cool or it's going to be a piece of shit. The anecdote about the real explosion is trivial at best, and at worst leaves me wondering why you chose to take a fact and turn it into bullshit in your book. Why not write an essay about the actual events if they intrigued you so much?

Let's not even get started on the ridiculous scientific accuracy of something like Star Trek or someone like Isaac Asimov.

That's why I love Bizarro. In Bizarro fiction, authors who make shit up for a living, reaaallly fucking make shit up for a living. Almost all Bizarro fiction takes place in some weird post apocalyptic world or alternate universe where nobody gives a shit about its plausibility or the accuracy of its inhabitants' physiology. Everything from the environment to the characters to the plots have a type of hyper creativity that makes Tom Clancy's stringent adherence to realistic gun play seem almost satirically obnoxious.

Seriously, I want to put 7 bullets from a 6 shot revolver in my brain pan every time I hear someone complain about reloading guns on THE WALKING DEAD. It's a TV show about zombies! You're willing to accept the living dead, but not that a character may have reloaded his weapon OFF SCREEN???
Fuck that shit. Give me Carlton Mellick's TUMOR FRUIT featuring a planet called Barack with acid oceans and homicidal aliens, or MP Johnson's floating psychic ham in PORK KNUCKLES MALLONE.

With Bizarro, I can make up a giant Robot Barack Obama to fight a giant zombie made of zombies built by a guy from the future but piloted by his present self who doesn't have a clue how to operate it. With Bizarro I can create a biological virtual reality using the hallucination causing blood of pig-frogs used by a nest of nuclear mutated vampires. I don't need to have seen an obscure newspaper article about frogs raining from the sky for that shit to be cool.

Why Bizarro? Because with Bizarro, my readers have no expectation that I'll limit myself to what is scientifically possible on Earth, or that my story will even take place on Earth, or anything remotely resembling Earth.
Why Bizarro? Because fuck reality. I see reality every time I step outside my door or turn on the evening news. Don't give me half-assed fiction. I like my asses big and full. Give me full assed fiction. Give me Bizarro.