Flesh for Fiction

As I was driving down Lakewood Blvd. today, I thought about fiction.

Why do we read them when we have our own imaginations that can come up with our own stories? Why do we trust what we read when it’s fiction? Why do we get angry or happy or sad or crying about made-up stories, when we know that that’s the intention of the writer? Why do we care about what happens to a group of fictional people with fictional histories who experience fictional incidents? I’m not saying this is bad, I’m just asking why.

When a writer writes fiction, why does he care if one direction of a storyline makes more sense than another, when neither directions happened anyway? Why does there need to be a suspension of disbelief? Why are we more satisfied with one resolution than another?

Why do we criticize a fictional movie for not doing what we expected it to do? Why do we feel more satisfied, or less satisified, with a fictional movie’s conclusion, if we can draw our own conclusions using our imaginations?

I noticed how an opinionated writer can pretty much tell the world what he believes without being criticized for it. Instead of writing an opinion or editorial piece, he writes a “fictional” story. Instead of the writer directly saying what he thinks, he has one of the characters do it. Instead of the writer saying that something is right or wrong, he has one of the characters perform an act whose consequence justifies the rightness or wrongness of that act, therefore proving the writer true. Because everything is happening through the characters in the fictional story, any fingerpointing or judgments are aimed at the characters, not the writer. The characters did it, after all.

If you want to talk about what you believe in, you can go two ways. One is by saying what you mean, straight from your own mouth, using your own words. The other is to create a set of characters to tell your personal truths for you, through fiction.