by Brooke Wolfe

Created on: April 09, 2009

Fiction:
-the act of feigning, inventing, or imagining.
-the class of literature comprising works of imaginative narration, esp. in prose form.
-an imaginary thing or event, postulated for the purposes of argument or explanation
-something feigned, invented, or imagined; a made-up story: We've all heard the fiction of her being in delicate health.
- borrows reality, doesn't live in it

These definitions seem to say that fiction is unpractical except for the third one, which says that fiction may be used for the purposes of argument or explanation. Many authors use fiction to explain an event that's happenedperhaps without witnessesor to explain emotions.
Fiction is not historical fact, though it may expound upon facts. Hemingway describes it as something "deep" within a writer that causes a story to "write itself" beyond the consciousness of the author. Andre Breton describes the way words write themselves in Manifestoes of Surrealism, "a rather strange phrase which came to me without any apparent relationship to the events in which, my consciousness agrees, I was then involved, a phrase which seemed to insistent, a phrase, if I may be so bold, which was knocking at the window. I took cursory note of it and prepared to move on when its organic character caught my attention." Though not much of the surrealist poetry in that book makes story-line sense, it is a linguistic stepping towards the streams of consciousness which Faulkner uses in As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.
Sometimes good fiction writes itself and the author hardly has to try to get the words out and a second revision is not necessary. Sometimes a piece of writing requires many meticulous revisions. When the flow of the writing doesn't seem to be coming naturally anymore and you don't feel like writing, Anderson tells us not to write, or at least to throw away anything that you do write at these times, suggesting that the best writing will come on impulse. There is writing that comes out proper the first time in a state of mania and never needs to look backthis is when a certain "ghost writer" dwells within the actual writer, and writes for him. Edgar Allan Poe probably had a very intense ghost writer. You don't even need to read Stephen King (watching his movies is enough) to get an impression of his writing-demon.
Tolstoy or Tolkien can be considered of the meticulous-type, who reread, re-edit, and re-draft every ink-stained speck on the page. These are the perfectionist masters whom everyone

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