Welcome to the end of the Internet, the last place you will look for hours. A dark hole for anyone who loves tales, deconstructing stories and those who make them. The website is tvtropes.org. Click that link if you dare.
I tend to troll around TVTropes often, generally after I have finished a work, be it a novel, TV show or movie to see how others have already broken the work down into all the little story pieces. Sometimes I find things they miss, but I rarely add. I am not chronicler of tropes, I enjoy them for the sake of them as a whole.
After I finished my review of American Gods, I jumped to the TVTropes page of that work. This lead me to the page on the author, Neil Gaiman. You can see how easy this website can be abused for someone who enjoys it so. Finally, I ended up on another topic: Muse Abuse.
I am going to finish with a small discussion on Muse Abuse. A small definition is when an author writes his or her true life to a degree that it hurts the inspiration. This can be from a small scale (an argument with your wife becomes a conversation in the middle of a book) or a large scale (the death of a loved one leads to an entire work devoted on them, warts and all). This has happened to me in my life. At times I have reveled in it, goading friends to guess which parts are true. Sometimes the truth is does not paint my experiences in a great light.
For example, I once wrote a fractured story about a guy reading at home who gets a call from a friend saying the friend needs help. He finds the friend but is surprised to learn that no call has been made. They begin drinking, becoming very drunk. After an adventure or two broken by periods of blackouts, our heroes end up in a diner where the friend jokingly calls the guy and tells him he needs help. The main character runs from the diner and in a drunken dream makes it home, where he is reading and gets a phone call.
It was not very good, a mobius tale that was contrived and a little boring. But it was based on my friends and a drunken moment late at night in a diner where one called the other's answering machine screaming for help. The intention was the drunk would wake up and hear the message, not remember the joke and think something devastating had happened. Haha.
So I took the small event and ran with it. When I showed it to my friends, they seemed to like it but all of them had nearly the same comment: We seem like drunks in this.
Yeah, I said, we are.
But, they would say, what would my mom think?
I guess that is the problem with stealing from your own life sometimes. You air dirty laundry and disappoint a lot of mothers.
