They say write what you know, but really? How much do you really know? In all likelihood, you have never been bitten by a radioactive spider, nor have you wielded a light-saber against an army of clones. You have never been called upon to carry a magic ring to destruction before it enslaves the world, nor have you been invited to attend a school for Wizards. There are slight odds that you are indeed a schizophrenic math genius, and that the world is a hologram imposed by renegade machines, or that you’ve robbed a casino, but I wouldn’t play those odds in Vegas.

No, most of us live lives of quiet desperation. We work crap jobs, have a series of nights of bad sex and drugs before (hopefully) settling down with someone special and pray to God or whatever you do or don’t believe in that no one blows the Bloody Hell out of us. We look at the world with an awkward mixture of despair and hope then lock ourselves in a dark room with a couple hundred strangers to watch stories of things that have never been, or at least, have never been in the context of your reality.

But enough about you, let’s talk about me.

I’m a writer: a professional journalist for nearly a decade. A few months ago, I finished my first screenplay, Nihilist Chic, and began the onerous task of shopping the damn thing. Odds are, I’m a lot like you. I sweat money and hustle for work. I have a good marriage after years of really bad relationships. I don’t drink near as much as I used to, and haven’t touched anything stronger in years. I look at the world and get pissed off and depressed and fearful, and then go lock myself up in a dark room with a few hundred strangers and try to forget.

And sometimes I stare up at the screen and say, “How do they do that?” If you’re supposed to write what you know, how do you know what it’s like to be a Peter Parker, or a Frodo Baggins or an Anakin Skywalker. When the lives on the screen are totally alien to the lives around us, how are we to conceive of them in the first place? Or at least, conceive of them without pantomiming the great feats of imagination that have preceded us?

For me, that’s where reality creeps in. You see, I’ve never slain vampires or had my sister abducted by aliens, but as a journalist, I’ve seen some pretty strange things. In the past few years, I’ve covered company after company laying off employees as the economy crashed; a teenage kid imprisoned for a crime he couldn’t have committed; a cellar “animal shelter” that was so barbarous and repulsive I nearly vomited; an eccentric Libertarian Druid running for governor of California; a poet who was sued by Nike over a poem and won. These are fabulous, fabulous stories, and they’re all available in your local newspaper. The real world is filled with things nigh-unimaginable. Dramatic things, surely, like the 911 tragedy and the Enron Debacle, but also small stories of petty corporate dictators and unlikely heroes, gruesome murders and lovable lunatics. Over the next few weeks in this space, we’re going to explore that world, and see if we can find some inspiration by looking at a world that, too often, is simply wearying, but is also undoubtedly, stranger than fiction.

(Victor D. Infante is a regular contributor to OC Weekly and the Worcester InCity Times. His book Learning to Speak: Selected Early Poems is available from Amazon.com, and he is currently seeking representation for his first screenplay, Nihilist Chic. Visit his web site at http://www.quantumredhead.com/victor.)

(c) Victor D. Infante, 2002