“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
Mark Twain 1897
My original idea for The Palantir was to write a Middle-Grade action-adventure book set in Salem, Massachusetts. But I thought about my favorite movies and realized I wanted to write something more like an Indiana Jones adventure. So, I added a lost Mayan city to spice up the storyline and thought I was all set – until my youngest daughter asked that we go on a trip to Machu Pichu for her college graduation gift. I agreed on one condition – that we go to an ancient Mayan city. She picked Lamanai in Belize.
The trip changed my life and my series. Not only was it a blast getting there (e.g., we took a high-speed boat up the New River to get to Lamanai), but it’s where I truly learned the meaning of Mark Twain’s quote that truth is stranger than fiction.
A few minutes into our tour of Lamanai, our guide stopped and warned us not to pick up any of the brownish-red rocks littering the ground. But instead of being rocks, they were ancient pottery shards, and it was illegal to remove them from the archeological site. It blew my mind. Here we were, waiting to see my first thousand plus year-old building, and our guide was talking about the two-thousand-year-old debris laying on the ground.
I asked him how many lost Mayan cities there were. He paused, looked around, then went over to a tree and said, “None.” He explained that in 1893, a man named William Wrigley introduced Juicy Fruit gum at the Chicago World’s Fair. It was an instant hit, but it required chicle, the sap from the sapodilla tree, which grows in the Yucatan Peninsula. Demand soared, and men, called chicleros, scoured the forests for the resin. At the same time, demand for Mahogany, used in Victorian-era furniture, was skyrocketing. Men searched every part of the peninsula to meet the demand for the two products.
They walked through all the old Mayan cities but found relatively few Mayan buildings, as the forest covered most of them. Even now, after over a century of archeological excavations, the forest still hides the vast majority of ancient Mayan buildings. Recent technological advancements, though, have enabled archeologists to learn more about what’s hidden. One study, for instance, identified over 60,000 hidden Mayan buildings in a single location.
The picture below is from later in the same trip, in Tikal, Guatemala. If you’d asked me at the start, would I ever think of holding tarantulas or eating dried crickets – I’d have given you an emphatic no. But, when my daughter/tour guide volunteered for the tarantula, I had to follow suit. Once I did, I realized that I wanted my main character, Alex Scire, to do these types of things.
Since that trip, I have found that it is easier and far more interesting to use historical figures and real places in my books rather than making things up.
I also learned in my research that many of the quotes we attribute to one person were actually spoken by other people. For instance, Lord Byron said in 1823, “Tis strange—but true; for truth is always strange, Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!”
Okay, one last example. “Truth is stranger than fiction because we don’t meet it as often.” Delphos, Ohio newspaper 1895.
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