Fairleigh Brooks

I've wondered about the differences between non-fiction and fiction writing, starting from the notion that no writing is completely one or the other. Even the wildest fiction begins with basic knowledge the author lives by - suns rise, gravity is real, beings die. On the flip side, there are mathematics textbooks clearly better than others, the more successful ones sometimes reflecting the author's take on life a little more than his or her take on numbers. I like to look at fiction writing as letting loose into the larger world the ideas in my world - population one - then taking account of the ideas that return, and just how battered they are. I take what's in my head and drag it into existence, out into that larger world.

Many of my stories emerge from a single observed detail. For example, "Nightfall From a Car Window" is about a fourteen-year-old boy being taken back to his mother's house, after his regular weekend visit with his father. It covers a couple of hours in the boy's life during which the ordinariness of life becomes extraordinary. It began with the feeling found in pulling away, in autumn dusk, from one of those accidental villages found at the intersection of an interstate and a local road.

I hope you'll try my stories, which aren't fifty shades of anything. And be sure to visit my groovy web site, burnedouthippiedude.com.