I feel that it's far past time to end my silence on the notion of whether or not you can make up any given outlandish thing. The short, it-should-be-very-obvious answer:
YES. Yes, you can.
For fuck's sake, OF COURSE you can! I am BEYOND sick and tired of hearing, particularly after some brain-fart the president had, or a display of outlandish behavior by [insert celebrity or politician here], or a catastrophic world event, this seemingly inevitable quote:
"You can't make this stuff up".
Motherfucker, yes you can! You can make ANYTHING up! The fact that you didn't doesn't change that fact! The human mind is capable of limitless leaps of logic, many seeming to be clearly insane to most. Witness Alice in Wonderland and hundreds of other books just as interesting. The next time you feel the above quote bubbling up in your throat, consider that Hollywood - for all of its creativity-killing executive power - STILL manages to pump out a few staggeringly creative movies per year. When Hollywood fails us, we still have independent cinema, not to mention television that still manages to give us lots of creative work that YOU may not come up with, but SOMEONE will.
So, then, it stops being a matter of whether you COULD make something up and veers off into questions like
"DID you, or did somebody get there first?"
"SHOULD you? Is it perhaps too irresponsible or inflammatory?"
"WOULD you, unless you were in the habit of thinking like a criminal or a sick-minded person?"
And that last one, I believe, is the real kicker. Most people find themselves incapable of making these things up because they simply cannot bring themselves to think like that, to imagine anything like them. And unless you're PAID to think like that - some of the aforementioned film creatives, or perhaps a criminal profiler, for example - there's nothing wrong with that. Let's just be real about what we are capable of, for good or for bad.
And please, stop saying this around your kids, as a favor to them, and to one creative here. When I was a child, I believed I was capable of conceiving of anything, and I still do. Truly, when awful real-world things happen or are said, I am most assuredly glad that I did not think of them. But I would hate for any child to grow up believing that their potential was limited. Don't do that to them. Let them write whatever they can imagine, draw whatever they imagine, and I know that most of you already will. But it starts with allowing them to believe that their imagination is unlimited.
Because it is.
