Fiction Is...

On mothers and stories

There’s no better day to talk about fiction than the one where we celebrate the people who first read it to us. My mother probably did. I just don’t remember much from childhood and you know how that goes. Trauma has this habit of slamming certain doors shut and swallowing the keys.

So here we are. Fiction.

Fiction is creative heaven and hell. And yes, both can be true at the same time.

Fiction is a coping mechanism. For the heartbroken. The deranged. The addicts. The walking wounded carrying whatever fucked-up thing life handed them and decided to call a lesson.

It’s the oldest thing we have for making sense of being human.

You know that thing cavemen figured out when they started painting on walls? That was fiction. That was us saying something happened, and I need you to feel it too.

Fiction is how we relate to lives we’ve never lived, pain we haven’t felt yet, and joy we’re terrified to want.

Fiction isn’t easy to write.

Let me rephrase that. Good fiction is hard to write.

AI can write fiction but it can’t write good fiction. At least not yet. Maybe never because all it does is take human ideas, human joy, human mess, and regurgitate it into a pattern it thinks resembles a story. It’s a very sophisticated copy machine. It doesn’t get heartbroken or addicted. It doesn’t remember. It doesn’t have a mother who read to it before bed.

And good fiction comes from somewhere real even when it’s completely made up because good ficion is really good lying.

Fiction is…

Keep it going in the comments. Drop your one-liner. What does fiction mean to you?