What is fiction, anyway?

Another author said, “it’s making something out of nothing.”

I think it’s that and more. For me, it’s taking the world as we know it, the people we have known or observed, the crises, wars, murders, events, the things that happen all around us, a great dinner, a near fatal accident, a plane crash, a love affair, a series of odd coincidences, whether involving world figures and celebrities or the characters who surround us each day, and creating a story that we want to immerse ourselves in, to be a part of—without having to really live through it ourselves. We want the drama, the mystery, the killer on the other side of the door, but without the danger.

I want to be James Bond, but I don’t really want to be swimming with crocodiles and alligators who are circling me for their next meal. I don’t want to be dissected by Goldfinger and his industrial laser. Actually, I like going to bed early.

As a reader, and a writer, I want to experience these things – in a comfy chair, sitting by the fire on a snowy evening. So, writers create a dangerous, mysterious, sometimes catastrophic world, similar to—yet often even more realistic or believable than the one we live in—and we put this creation on paper, on an eReader screen and in audio versions so that we can entertain our readers. If we’re good at what we do, we may also enlighten the reader—and, strangely, the writer himself, too—by creating a greater truth from the fiction or by using the story to communicate our inner feelings, the ones we would never express except in a work of fiction, where everyone knows it’s only make-believe.