The Writer's Weekly

Good morning everyone!

I doubt any of you have missed the headline this morning about the Austrian man that held his daughter, and three of their seven children, imprisoned for twenty-four years.

My father made a comment to me this morning that is very true, he said: If someone wrote this story in a book no one would believe it.

The critics would say that the author had created a fantastical, larger-than-life story.

Well, I think life is already large enough and I think any author would be hard-pressed to 'make-up' a scenario that hasn't occurred somewhere at some time in history.

Where do these stories come from but the human psyche (which is linked to the consciousness of all humanity after all)?

It is for this exact reason that I am not comfortable critiquing books.

In the short story class I was taking (and one of the reasons why I stopped going) the teacher kept commenting that events in people's stories would never happen in real life. I bit my tongue more than once when he said that because he was implying that life is slow-moving and rather boring. Well, maybe his life is, but not everyone's.

I bet that a lot of the events in people's stories were based on their real experiences or things that they'd witnessed. I found this assumption, that he knew what would happen and not happen in this world, very pompous (as well as closed-minded).

I find the events that happened in Austria tragic and horrific, but do they surprise me? No. I would never have come up with such a twisted story even for a book, but life has a way of shocking you.

I think it was Woody Allen (and likely many other people) that said: Art reflects life.

That's what I think too and it's a wild world out there!