A Quote by Robert J. Sawyer
I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.
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As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.
I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.
People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.
I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.
The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.
Very seldom in my fiction have I directly used the stories people have told me. I think ripping off people's lives in fiction is dangerous. It also lacks imagination.
I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.
From fiction, you do not get to learn much because it is only imagination. Whereas, from non-fiction, people can understand and learn from the realities it covers.
Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.
People read fiction... to learn something about how to live their lives.
One of the fantastic things about books, fiction or non-fiction, is the way they give you a chance to look into different lives.
There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.
I dislike that premise implies that a fiction writer is incapable of dreaming up stories that can bring readers to tears, that if you are lucky enough to be living a pretty sedate life ,as I am, you've got nothing worthy of writing about, that you're incapable of making a reader's gut wrench.Frankly, that's what makes readers nervous, the sorcery of you or me or any good fiction writer making up characters who feel like real people, of telling a story that feels true but isn't.
General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
Mystery, investigation, false leads, solution - we associate that structure with genre fiction, but it exists in our real lives, too. There's no reason why literary fiction shouldn't be able to acknowledge that and make it fresh.
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