Wild Fiction

‘You’re usually a collection of 26 letters lying on some pages on my study floor, among the other unfinished novels. Of course, I pack your body in the basement in a labelled box. It’s just your mind and your actions that I keep on those pages.’
‘So when I wake up in the basement do you have to do some jiggery-pokery to get my mind and body back together again?’
‘Not usually. I just read the last bit of the story I was working on and it all comes back to me. It’s like opening a floodgate. The memory of what I was last doing washes in, fills my head, and you’re back where I last left you.’
‘I’m sure the readers don’t like the reality of what they’re reading thrust back in their faces like this.’
‘Some of them don’t and have told me so. They want their fiction to be escapist. To whisk them away on an adventure and not be reminded that the characters are fictitious. Other’s love it, one bloke even wants to meet you.’
‘Who?’ Rebecca was squirming in the chair a big smile on her face.
‘Enough.’
‘Go on, please tell me.’
‘No, it’s time to move the story on again.’
‘That’s if the reader wants to carry on reading this story,’ Rebecca said staring out from between the letters on the page. She was hoping that the reader would take her side and, to spite the author, close the book and put it down.
‘They do. If they’ve read this far then they’re going to want to know what happens in the end.’
‘If they want to know what happens at the end they could just turn to the last page and read it.’
‘Then they’ll miss out on all the exciting and cryptic facts I’ve filled the pages between here and the end with, won’t they?’
‘Have you filled it with exciting and cryptic facts?’
‘I will have when I’ve written it.’
‘You’re so egocentric, I wish someone like Virginia Woolf or John Steinbeck or Guy de Maupassant had created me. They know how to develop characters in a story. They don’t mess about with trivial dialogue like this.’
‘Do you think the reader will remember you more if you continue to behave like this? If they don’t get to the end of the book, they may not remember you at all. You know what that means don’t you? Dead as a doornail.’