When Our Stories Come True

When Our Stories come True

By Nancy Pickard

It's spooky when scenes from my books come true.

That happened just a couple of weeks ago, in Abilene, Ks., but before I tell you what happened there, I'll tell you what happens in the book:

In The Virgin of Small Plains, our heroine goes with three women friends to a restaurant in the small town.  As they travel there, they're aware of severe storm warnings.  At the restaurant, while they're seated at a round wooden table, one of them looks out the windows and notices that the sky has turn seriously ominous.   She tells the others, and they all get up and troop to the windows to look.  At that moment, a tornado warning siren blares.  The women hurry to the restaurant basement with the rest of the customers, except for our heroine who hangs back to stare at the boiling clouds.

In Abilene, our heroine (me) goes with three women to a restaurant in that small town.  (The photo is of the restaurant, "The Kirby House.")   As we travel there, we're aware of severe storm warnings.  At the restaurant, while we're seated at a round wooden table, I look out the windows and noticed that the sky has turned seriously ominous.  I tell the others, and we all get up and troop to the windows to look.  At that moment, a tornado warning siren blares.  We hurry to the restaurant basement with the rest of the customers, except for our foolish heroine who hangs back to stare at the boiling clouds and to exclaim, "Wow, this is just like in my book!"

 

  Years ago, I wrote a book called Dead Crazy that featured--God knows why--a victim who was an old woman who collected porcelain pigs, plastic pigs, pigs made of every craft material.  Her body was found in her bathtub, with pigs floating around her.  (Why in the world did I ever think this was an attractive idea??)  About three years after the book's publication, I opened the local paper to read of an old woman who had been murdered.  She collected porcelain pigs.  Her body was found in her bathtub.  At least there were no pigs in there with her!

I have a dear friend, Randy Russell, who named the characters in his first novel after some of his buddies, just for the fun of it.  In the book, his protagonist--named after Randy's best friend-- gets shot and killed.  Not long after the book came out, Randy's real-life best friend was shot three times in a bizarre incident that came out of the blue as he was minding his own business.  Thank God, he was not killed, but Randy was so spooked that he vowed never to name characters after real people.  Or at least, knowing Randy's sly sense of humor, never after people he likes. 

Then there's the story of the bird who went missing in my book and the one who went missing in real life, and how similar their happy endings are.  Again, this is from The Virgin of Small Plains, which I'm beginning to think I spirited out of the same ether that creates real life.

 In the book, a big red parrot escapes during the aforementioned tornado.  His current owner, Abby, is heartsick to lose him and puts up signs, etc., all over town.  His original owner was Abby's teenage love, Mitch.  In the novel, Mitch shows up in town after a 16-year absence.  He goes to his parents' home.  The big red parrot just happens to fly into the back yard at that moment when Mitch is there.  There just happens to be an old cage in the basement, and Mitch collects the bird, glad (and amazed, as are we all) to be reunited with his old parrot again.

When I wrote that, I thought, "nobody's ever going to believe this."

But I left it in, because that's what happened, dammit.  I can't help it if it's the truth!

Now here's what happened a few months after Virgin came out:

I have Friends With Birds.  Cockatiels.  One day, one of the birds escaped and flew away.  My friends were heartsick, just as Abby was in the book.  We put posters on posts, just as in the book. A week passed, the temperature was dropping, we were sure the bird was a goner in more ways than one.

They got their beloved bird back, just as in the book!  Here's how. . .

On the day it flew away, it apparently headed straight toward Kansas City, Mo, where it landed in the back yard of people who keep Cockatiels!!  

They had an old cage, and they brought the bird in, just as in the book.

The happy ending to this real life story is that the people who found the bird finally saw one of the "lost bird" notices my friends had put in the local papers, and called to say, "We have him." 

And what is the moral of that story to me, as a writer?  It's that I can trust my instincts about what is "true."  Just because something is a wild coincidence doesn't mean it can't happen.

The uncanniness doesn't end with stories that come true after we make up our fictional ones.  Sometimes things from our books come true before our books are written:

Since publishing Virgin, two people have told me of murders in their small towns that were nearly identical to what I used in my novel, right down to the cover-up and the same roles that the characters played in the real-life towns. I have no memory of every hearing of those actual murders, and yet I re-created them in my book!  How can that be?  I suspect what happened is not so much uncanny as it is the strong likelihood that I did learn about those cases years ago, they stuck in my subconscious, and then they percolated up as "plots" that I thought I made up.  I'll never know for sure if that's what happened in my creative process.  The whole thing gives me the shivers anyway, whatever the explanation.  I'm horrified that my plot actually happened to (at least) two women.

I've thought--or maybe other people have suggested to me--that stories like this might make an interesting book about the shivery connections between art and life.   Maybe I can collect some of those connections from you!

Have you ever known of a fictional story that came true?

If you're a fiction writer, have any of your story ideas materialized in real life?