This is a terrific piece - it really makes me think and aligns with a lot of ideas that I'm wrestling with myself.
I'm with you that fiction is just better. It's freer, braver, allows a person to create in so many more directions than 'reality.' But at the same time there's something vital about lived experience that animates so much of good fiction - and that quality is very difficult to find if you're just making it up. And what's a little crazymaking at the moment is the extent to which memoir and veracity are seen to be the only kinds of truth.
So many interesting thoughts in here and I think you deal with the David Shields challenge really nicely. There's a certain kind of constriction from literary fiction - and autofiction, the non-fiction novel, reality hunger, etc, were needed to break through that - but it's really important to make use of imagination as well and the freedom that you can get from moving outside your biography/personal experience.
What a terrific and generous take on what I wrote. Apparently, comments were inadvertently--not by me--disabled as I don't have access to settings. So, I lost a bunch of thoughts from the 21 folks who posted a "like". So glad you alerted me to the problem--I thought maybe nobody cared enough to comment on his knotty topic. But here you are. Thank you, Sam! And if anyone else sees this, do check out Castalia. I love Sam's essays!
This is a terrific piece - it really makes me think and aligns with a lot of ideas that I'm wrestling with myself.
I'm with you that fiction is just better. It's freer, braver, allows a person to create in so many more directions than 'reality.' But at the same time there's something vital about lived experience that animates so much of good fiction - and that quality is very difficult to find if you're just making it up. And what's a little crazymaking at the moment is the extent to which memoir and veracity are seen to be the only kinds of truth.
So many interesting thoughts in here and I think you deal with the David Shields challenge really nicely. There's a certain kind of constriction from literary fiction - and autofiction, the non-fiction novel, reality hunger, etc, were needed to break through that - but it's really important to make use of imagination as well and the freedom that you can get from moving outside your biography/personal experience.
Best wishes,
Sam
What a terrific and generous take on what I wrote. Apparently, comments were inadvertently--not by me--disabled as I don't have access to settings. So, I lost a bunch of thoughts from the 21 folks who posted a "like". So glad you alerted me to the problem--I thought maybe nobody cared enough to comment on his knotty topic. But here you are. Thank you, Sam! And if anyone else sees this, do check out Castalia. I love Sam's essays!