"Remember when I moved in you...."
Life is the greatest form of fiction.
For what makes great fiction? Characters that you identify with, that through their thoughts, their words and deeds compel you to let them into your heart? A story that drives you to want to know what is on the next page, plot twists, character twists, hidden details and lives revealed or discovered through circumstance. That's good fiction, when it makes you want to believe it is real even if the only thing that is real is the description of the girl on page 47.
But what is the difference between what's in the pages of the books on your shelf and the people you can touch? We create characters just as the writers do. We build impressions, assumptions, presumptions and many other 'umpsions. We let people into our hearts and shut them out, live secret lives or have secret details of pasts that we keep hidden just as some of our favorite characters do.
It makes sense that fiction would mimic life as that is where it is drawn from. To say that a writer was able to make characters come alive on the page is great praise. I have asked this question before but I keep coming back too it. Where is the line, if there is one at all, between what is real and what is the product of our own fictions? The best books seem real in our minds when we read them, why not the same for the best fiction that we tell ourselves through the day? Is there such a thing as the clear and definitive truth, or only different perspectives on the same unfolding stories?
For what makes great fiction? Characters that you identify with, that through their thoughts, their words and deeds compel you to let them into your heart? A story that drives you to want to know what is on the next page, plot twists, character twists, hidden details and lives revealed or discovered through circumstance. That's good fiction, when it makes you want to believe it is real even if the only thing that is real is the description of the girl on page 47.
But what is the difference between what's in the pages of the books on your shelf and the people you can touch? We create characters just as the writers do. We build impressions, assumptions, presumptions and many other 'umpsions. We let people into our hearts and shut them out, live secret lives or have secret details of pasts that we keep hidden just as some of our favorite characters do.
It makes sense that fiction would mimic life as that is where it is drawn from. To say that a writer was able to make characters come alive on the page is great praise. I have asked this question before but I keep coming back too it. Where is the line, if there is one at all, between what is real and what is the product of our own fictions? The best books seem real in our minds when we read them, why not the same for the best fiction that we tell ourselves through the day? Is there such a thing as the clear and definitive truth, or only different perspectives on the same unfolding stories?