There have been a few times after I’ve written a scene in a story when I would doubt the believability of the scenario I have concocted, only for a real-life scenario to make my fiction far more believable than I would have ever predicted.

Take, for example, the first novel I ever published, Coffee-to-Go. In it, I depict a corrupt Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. My main character, Leo, gets detained and threatened with deportation because he can’t immediately prove he’s an American citizen.

Now, we’re seeing this exact scenario play out in reality, with even Indigenous Americans being questioned or detained by ICE agents.

In my upcoming sci-fi novel, The Medellan Conspiracy, it delves into more political issues than the first novel of the series, Artifact of the Dawn. However, when I wrote it in 2017, I was not envisioning that the extreme xenophobia I was writing about was possible. Yet, here we are in 2025 with some things I imagined for a fictional world happening in reality.

I won’t spoil the plot, but I hope that some of the worst depictions I included in the narrative don’t come to pass. My imagination went to some dark places when I wrote that first draft, and I’m still flabbergasted with how quickly everything has gone from bad to worse in our world already. One thing that strikes me is some feedback from one of my beta readers, which included asking me to slow the pace between all the action sequences, because things would never happen that fast in real-life.

Looking around at everything that’s going on now, I dearly wish I could tell them they were wrong about that (long story, but they tragically passed away last year).

Still, mine is a work of fiction and as pummeled as I feel by the constant stream of bad news, I think their point is still valid. My story should serve as escapism, and so slowing the pace to make all the danger my protagonists face early in the story more palatable is what’s right for the story. In hindsight, I can see that the current pace of the story is exhausting to read, so as I’m working on the penultimate edit, I’m looking to add some breathing room with some scenes of calm domesticity to break up the action.

Have you ever read a newly published fictional story, only for some part of it to happen in the real world? Please share in the comments!