For years I've laughed at that disclaimer

you see in almost every novel ever published:

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

As if!!

[source: one of my many paperbacks]

Joyce Carol Oates

won my respect for many reasons, not least of which, her more-honest disclaimer:

Actual historical sources are acknowledged:

Today's savvy readers are onto us

and making memes about us, warning our coworkers, neighbors, friends, enemies and acquaintances that anything and everything is fair game as material to feed the fires of a fiction-writer's imagination.

ource

Wallace Stegner

beat me to it, and I cannot find the original quote anywhere, but yesterday for the first time I saw someone quoting him on the thing that has tormented me as a reader in the hundred and hundreds of novels I've read that were so obviously based on real-life characters and places:

“One of my favorite quotes on writing is the one from Wallace Stegner where he says, ‘The greatest piece of fiction ever written is the disclaimer at the beginning of each book that says none of the characters in this book are based off of anyone alive or dead.’ What a crock, I mean that’s what you’re supposed to do — find interesting people and populate your novels with them.”

--Craig Johnson, "Longmire" author source

---

Exactly! Thank you, Mr. Johnson!

Almost every person I write has a basis in a someone I met in real life, or someone I read about in a newspaper article. And that's what this best-selling novelist does. I feel vindicated at last after years of reading those disclaimers in novels.

#GottaLoveCraigJohnson!

“One of the dirty little secrets about my books is that the plots come from newspaper articles, every single one of them,” he said. “I think that helps me keep my character, Walt Longmire, anchored in a reality that western sheriffs deal with every day. I don’t ever want to write books where Walt is on a cruise ship or something stupid like that.”

He will continue to pull inspiration from the people, places and things around him, Johnson added.

Johnson, who lives in rural Wyoming and is often spotted in a cowboy hat. It’s one that’s definitely in character for Walt Longmire, the main character created by Johnson who has been the focus of more than a dozen novels and stories.

“I stumbled onto an interesting character and after 15 novels, two novellas, and an anthology of short stories he has yet to bore me,” Johnson said, noting that he appreciates Walt Longmire’s down-to-earth characteristics. “My sheriff is not the usual 6-foot-2 (inches) of twisted steel and sex appeal that you see in a lot of crime fiction. He is more like all of us or what I refer to as ‘over,’ overweight, over age, overly depressed, but he gets up each morning with a sense of humor and a determination that I find truly heroic.”

The Longmire series has become so popular that in 2012 it was developed into the A&E series, “Longmire,” starring Robert Taylor, Lou Diamond Phillips and Katee Sackoff. It was the network’s most watched original drama series and now runs on Netflix.

Author profile | Craig Johnson | Mystery writer says he draws inspiration from newspapers for best-selling novels

Well, that led me to look up more on Stegner.

Wallace Stegner | The Art of Fiction No. 118 | Interviewed by James R. Hepworth

“My methods are prelapsarian and prewordprocessarian. It takes me many rewritings to get a first draft, and all the chapters that went into it have been thrown away successively until I get something that will read consecutively. I go through that with an editing pencil and retype it to make a relatively clear second draft.”

Gotta Love Author Interviews!

Especially when their confessions reassure us that we are not alone.

I don’t go in search of projects. Sometimes they appear before my eyes, and sometimes they grow over a long period of time as I brood. Sometimes I know there’s a book there, and I have to hunt through an awful lot of research material, as I did with Angle of Repose. I have started books without knowing where they were going to end. That’s more dangerous. But in the case of Crossing to Safety the book just grew, more or less, through personal experience in Vermont, Wisconsin, and to a small extent, in Italy. In those places what was gradually developing in my mind could find a home. That’s how the book came about. It took a long time. I had to do it by trial and error, and I was years in getting it finally sorted out. It’s not a conscious process.

INTERVIEWER

Was there any point where you definitely knew this project was a novel?

STEGNER

I knew from the beginning it was going to be a book. You have that feeling. It’s like having a fish on the line. You know when it’s an old boot and when it’s a fish. But I didn’t know what the book was. I’ve got piles of manuscripts over there, eight and ten inches high, of stuff written and tossed aside in the process of finding out. At several points the novel was going in entirely different directions. It had different characters from those that now appear, more characters, episodes that never got into the finished book at all. The novel started in a different place. It proceeded toward a different end.

source

There's more, so much more,

from so many authors, so many interviews, more than I can read and sift through, collect, cite, and share here.

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