Fiction as reality

This isn’t a particularly original thought, but . . . I was reading this discussion by Rhian Ellis about fiction and nonfiction:

Fiction teaches some excellent, if subtle, lessons. There’s the basic one: Other people have some of the same thoughts and feelings as you do, and its relative: Other people have lives that are incredibly different from yours.

and this reminded me of something I realized awhile ago, I guess around the time I started writing books, which is that (most) fiction is about reality. To expand on this, when I was a kid and read lots of books, I thought of fiction as stories that people make up. But my impression now is that many of the best stories are true–basically, I’m talking about anecdotes as well as longer stories that might be categorized as “gossip” or “life stories”–and that fiction is a way to try out various possibilities, move things around, do various what-ifs.

My books are all nonfiction (I hope) but they do have some narratives in them, and I think the key for me was realizing that I wanted to write because I had things I want to tell people (including myself). Which is slightly different from the other motivation for storytelling, the motivation I knew about when I was a kid, which is to entertain people. The paradox (but it isn’t really, no paradox is really a paradox once you open it up) is that the best entertainment can come from stories that someone really feels he or she needs to tell.

1 thought on “Fiction as reality

  1. It seems to me I read advice years ago, perhaps on the system-dynamics (feedback control theory applied to human and organizational systems) mailing list that, if you wanted to improve your system dynamics skills, you should read novels.

    Of course, you have to understand the math and have the ability to carry out simulations in that field, but I think the message was related to your message here: novels (fiction) abstract out certain aspects of real life, and they have the ability not only to relate what someone perceived but also to give it a theme and an interpretation. Understanding real life better can help us improve our modeling of real problems, or at least so it would seem.

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