Fiction is a deceiving word. It conjures up images of high fantasy, sci-fi monsters, and mystery thrillers. While these are all legitimate sub-genres of the wide expanse that is fiction, there is one factor that makes something fiction: reality.
Reality is the starting point for every piece of fiction. Authors do not dream up a story out of no where. Stories are formed out of the experiences and memories an author has. Characters are based on friends, family members, and acquaintances. Tension is set from the conflicts that have arisen in day-to-day life. The setting can be fantastical, the time can be irrelevant, and the characters can be unbelievable, but there are core themes that run through the story that are grounded in reality. Life, death, hope, love, loss, betrayal, revenge, regret, sorrow, joy, war, anger, lust, forgiveness, redemption–just to name a few. These are all threads woven into the fiction genre that are taken from the tapestry of reality.
Therefore, fiction is nothing more than the ordered arrangement, by an author, of these themes in a way that the reader can relate. Sometimes it takes dreaming up wizards, dragons, and magic; sometimes it takes remembering the history of a nation’s past. The details are minorities when it comes to fiction, but they are invaluable when trying to understand the reality behind the fiction. Authors do nothing on a whim; there is always a reason for what they write, whether they explicitly know it or not. There is reason behind the name of that character, the way he or she responds in that situation, the conflict between characters, the setting of the climax, or the resolution of a lover’s quest.
What makes fiction is not the outrageous characters, breathtaking scenes, or expanded universes; what makes good fiction great is the author’s ability to blur the line between your fiction and their reality. When an author can move you past the words and descriptions on the page by inviting you into a larger story–one sprinkled with themes of love, betrayal, hope, loss, etc.–you begin to see bits of reality in stories of fiction you never glimpsed before. You begin to see that experiences are not individual incidents but rather shared moments which every human being can understand at one level or another. One person’s isolated reality becomes everyone’s shared fiction.
I do not claim to be a great writer of fiction, nor do I aspire to write the next best-selling novel. My hope is that you search for yourself in this story, wherever that might be, and explore the themes it presents. Allow me the opportunity to blur the lines of my reality in hopes of creating our fiction.
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
