How Life Informs My Fiction Writing

blurring the Line Between Life, facts, and Fiction

My husband Jesse and I were talking about the definition of the word offal the other day. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. We just do stuff like that.

We confirmed that offal, spelled o-f-f-a-l and pronounced like the word spelled a-w-f-u-l, as in you’re an awful person, but of course, you’re not. Anyway, the offal with an o is indeed the entrails and internal organs of an animal used as food.

A Marketer Changed the Name, so Offal is Less Awful

Borrowing haphazardly from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in act two, Juliet says, “Tis but thy name that is my enemy. Thou art thyself though not a Montague. … O, be some other name!”

Re-naming a product is often the first step in a larger marketing strategy to make the product sold easier for a buyer to understand. Or, in some circumstances, skirt around the edge of what a product actually is.

I didn’t expect marketing speak to show up in our casual conversation about offal. But when you go grocery shopping, know that intestines, heart, liver, brains, and so on go by the name ‘variety meats’. That sounds a lot less awful than offal. My advice. Read the label before you buy.

How a Casual Conversation Informed My Fiction Writing

When Jesse and I had this fascinating discussion about offal, I wrote episode eight of my audio-fiction podcast, The History Singer. So, of course, the word offal showed up. Here’s the scene.

text of the history singer audio excerpt

We rode forth in a loose wedge formation to dispatch the remaining riders. I blocked out the noise of battle. It enhanced the scope of my awareness as if I stood within a circle and innately knew what was going on within and around it. Pretty words for a man who was slicing heads off necks, blood burbling up like fountains. A few heads hung on by a bit of tissue, swinging as their mounts ran on, eyes wide with terror.

It was a silent choreography of death. I blocked a strike to my head with the flat of my sword, forcing the rider’s blade around and down to slice his belly open, organs spilling out like offal.

And there you have it. This a small example of how my life informs my fiction.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.