Things you can't get away with in fiction:
- Thread starter blacbird
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Yeah, to paraphrase Mark Twain: of course real life is stranger than fiction, fiction has to make sense.
This is kind of a meta concern about writing, but I'm not sure anymore what fiction is good for. The characters have nothing to do with real people, who are inconsistent and unpredictable; and the events have nothing to do with the real world, in which apparently random things happen and poetic justice doesn't hold.
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Some fiction isn't good for anything much. 
Having said that, fiction is potentially good for:
- helping people step outside their normal perspective and see the world through new eyes.
- being beautiful (a worthy goal, in my mind)
- providing inspiration (the different kinds could be a whole set of subpoints)
- providing entertainment
Having said that, fiction is potentially good for:
- helping people step outside their normal perspective and see the world through new eyes.
- being beautiful (a worthy goal, in my mind)
- providing inspiration (the different kinds could be a whole set of subpoints)
- providing entertainment
I wish there was a smiley for laughing at something you really shouldn't laugh at and then feeling a bit guilty about it...
I mostly read and write for amusement, so I guess that, and probably beauty, are the only things I still believe fiction can achieve for me--and even then, the successes are rare. That's far from what a younger version of myself thought.Some fiction isn't good for anything much.
Having said that, fiction is potentially good for:
- helping people step outside their normal perspective and see the world through new eyes.
- being beautiful (a worthy goal, in my mind)
- providing inspiration (the different kinds could be a whole set of subpoints)
- providing entertainment
Fiction can say whatever it wants, but the structure underlying reality won't change to suit that.
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