Stranger than Fiction
2003-12-02 - 12:27 a.m.

So anyway, I thought maybe I’d write a new story, and I thought I’d name the heroine Trista, after that girl that's all over the magazine covers, because she seemed to have a place in the collective consciousness, and maybe I wouldn’t even have to describe her. She looked pretty much like this Trista girl anyways.

I was thinking that maybe I’d name the guy William, after Prince William, because all the girls swoon over him, and I thought it might be nice if they swooned over my hero too. Maybe his best friends could call him Wills, then no one would miss the reference.

There’ll probably be some bad guy, although I don’t know if it will be some bad feeling, or a real person. If it’s a real person, I’ll probably call him Jonathan Edwards, after the great preacher, just because that’s a pretty good name for a bad guy, I think. I have nothing against preachers in general or Rev. Edwards specifically.

So I sat down to write this great story with all these beautiful, likable characters, but all I could get on the paper was a lot of thoughts about you and I, and no one wanted to read that.

I tried to write a children’s story, something with a cute protagonist and a moral at the end. Nothing heavy-handed, you understand, just a little something to give the book some weight. I was going to make the hero a teddy bear, but that’s been done too many times, and I’m not a kid anymore anyways.

I tried for awhile to write some nonfiction, but the truth is that I always come back to you and I when I try that, and no one wants to hear about you and I, and it’s not as if it’s anything that would help them out anyway.

So finally I just wrote what I felt like, and it ended up being too short for a real story, but it was still more real than anything else I wrote last night.

It only said “I love you.”

I guess it ended up being nonfiction after all.