No, I Won’t Put Your Cat In My Book

There are two conversations that are inevitable when people find out you write fiction. The first one you know. Everyone knows. Writers have complained about it for years.

“Where do you get your ideas?”

Harlan Ellison used to tell people that he got them at K-mart, four for a dollar. It’s as good an answer as any.

But that’s not the most frustrating of the conversations. It can usually be laughed off in a sentence or two and you can get back to enjoying your evening. No, the one that really drives me crazy is when someone starts telling an anecdote about their friend or their pet or their breakfast, whatever, and then they say, “Oh, you should put that in your book.”

I assume that’s supposed to be helpful or something. It is not. And it can be damned uncomfortable trying to figure out a polite way to tell someone (often a friend or relative) that, no, Fluffy will not be appearing in the book.

Let me explain a basic rule of writing fiction. If it doesn’t move the story along in some way (either through plot or character development) then it shouldn’t be there. Humorous asides find their way into my work organically, they come from a natural progression, I do not shoehorn in funny stories.

So, no, I won’t put your cat in my book……