I make things up and write them down. I hope one day someone will read them and believe me, and then print out a copy for someone else to read. Until then, would you believe me if I told you
You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there’s been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it’s a way of life for them. It doesn’t mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book—if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don’t. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that’s otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn’t fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it’s not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading.
I believe it. For writers, note the influence of writings in the first person…
Ohio State University researchers have released a study about “experience-taking,” the psychological term for the moment when readers find themselves “feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses” of a fictional character when reading.
“The results showed that participants who read a story told in first-person, about a student at their own university, had the highest level of experience-taking. And a full 65 percent of these participants reported they voted on Election Day, when they were asked later. In comparison, only 29 percent of the participants voted if they read the first-person story about a student from a different university.”
From the study (http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/exptaking.htm): “Experience-taking doesn’t happen all the time. It only occurs when people are able, in a sense, to forget about themselves and their own self-concept and self-identity while reading, Kaufman said.” “The results showed that participants who read a story told in first-person, about a student at their own university, had the highest level of experience-taking.”
For the writer of fiction everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.
- Flannery O’Connor, in the way of seeing as part of the “habit of art.” Read more.
“Ok aspiring fiction writers, if you’ve ever wondered how to write a successful novel, the secret is here: kill off your characters. Of the handful of books that won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2011, all 13 novels had the common theme of putting to death main characters…” Read more…
“The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”
We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.
Someone in the cheese department at the Westside Market has gotten creative with the cheese labeling. Or asKathy Cacace notes in her Tweet: has “fucking lost their mind.” The description on this chunk of mimolette reads: “Sara had been gone for 25 years, and in all that time I hadn’t found any new ways to cope. Only to miss her.” This appears to be from James Patterson’s book, Run For Your Life, where he writes something similar about a woman named “Maeve.” (via Unexpected, Bizarre Literary Reference On This Piece Of Cheese: Gothamist)
‘Fiction novel’ is an automatic rejection. This is not a mistake I ever overlook. It’s not a typo. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what two words mean, and it’s a HUGE RED FLAG for bad writing… If you grew up in juvenile detention and murdered your first three husbands, stir fried your cats and enrolled your children in Fagin’s School for Thieves, I’m ok with it. The ONLY thing I care about is whether your novel is enticing. Sadly, it’s not. And it’s a fiction novel, so it doesn’t even really exist.
Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures.
