Control: Reality vs. Fiction…

I, Dalton Lewis, published a book yesterday, and I wanted to talk about reality vs. fiction a bit.

In reality my friend died in an altercation with a cop because he hated himself for being gay when he was in his twenties. I miss him. He played roleplaying games with us and played Magic: the Gathering with us and took us to hockey games. He played soccer with us and mowed our lawns for money during high school.

In fiction I took away his friends. I wanted to show the loneliness of many people in high school. I didn’t have any friends for my first two years of high school so things went poorly for me. I wanted to show a little bit of that hopelessness and helplessness. Kevin also has a stepsister who is pretty and with whom he has trouble relating. In reality Rylan did have a pretty sister — so that’s not too far off. I also made him a high school student when he killed himself and eliminated the cop from the situation. I wanted to focus on Kevin Roosevelt and not have a cop on whom to blame the whole thing.

Mitch Kurson, black quarterback, is based on several people that I know — that are hardworking jocks who are smart and have had injuries hurt their careers at sports during high school. I know a couple of people who were supposed to be the best ever at track but who had injuries derail their careers. I wanted to show the transition from jock to person who won’t be the greatest ever and has to make it with the power of his intellect. I wanted to show that people can pick themselves up after such an injury and do something fantastic.

The general feel of high school as a scary situation in which things can go terribly wrong at any time? That is based off of every person’s high school experiences. We’ve all felt that — the reality of high school, of needing everything to go perfectly and watching everything go badly…and watching the popular kids get drunk, get laid, and make valedictorian.

I wanted two rival writers in this story. I wanted that because I know a lot of writers — some considered very good and some considered pretty good. They have an interesting chemistry — trying to get along and help each other even though we are sort of competing with each other to see who is number one. Neil and Redman fight because Neil tells the bare truth and people love it. Redman tries to ascend and tell the reality behind that truth — and people don’t get it.

Redman, Neil, Mitch, and others end up in the hospital. I wanted the hospital to be an important symbol of a society that gives band-aids for gunshot wounds when dealing with mental illness, physical trauma, and trying to help the ninety-nine percent with serious physical and mental health problems. I have a knee issue that was never solved and a mental health issue — paranoid schizophrenia — which will never get solved, not properly.

I wanted a schizophrenic character because I always write about mental health issues and mental illness in my writing. Redman has a mental illness in addition to seeing ghosts. He’s sick and doesn’t realize it and doesn’t know that he needs help. That is based on my real-life experiences in Las Vegas, Nevada when I was in my twenties. I went through that — the craziness, the wandering, the hallucinations, the detachment from reality. I wanted to show that theme in the book, too.

The goal remained to write about wonderful people in traumatic situations. I feel that I did well.

Thanks, and take care, friends.