A novel is fiction, but what's behind the fiction? In Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, his Kabul, Afghanistan is a very real place. The setting is a key element of the book's powerful story. But did his father's house actually have a "smoking room" that "perpetually smelled of tobacco and cinnamon"? Outside, was there really a sorry garden they called "the Wall of Ailing Corn"? Perhaps. And that's where the genius lies, I think...in the perhaps. It could have been that way. So when Harlan Coben's The Innocent opens a scene set in Irvington, New Jersey, I'm not surprised when he describes an "enormous beer bottle" with "it's crown 185 feet in the air." I don't know that the giant bottle of Pabst Blue Ribon beer actually exists, but I can certainly imagine it.
Inspiration. The story behind the story. That's what I write about here in the Tin House Tango Journal. My stories are not real. But reality influences my stories, and this journal gives me a place to record some of the factual tidbits that are woven into my writing.
