Seed pods are stranger than fiction.
I've revised characters countless times to ensure no one will take offense at possible imputed personal resemblance, but the characters lose their luster and those who might be offended will surely find something else to offend them in my writing. It helps to fall back on the words of the writer I'm currently devouring, and his thoughts on the writing life:
“The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as fiction and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called nonfiction strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things. We know that most great novels and stories come not from things that are entirely invented, but from perfect knowledge and close observation. To say they are made up is an injustice in describing them. I sometimes say that I don’t make up anything—obviously, that’s not true. But I am usually uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling me the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.”
[James Salter in an interview with Paris Review]
