> fictional movies affect our thinking about real events A creative writing instructor of mine many years ago told a story about watching Saving Private Ryan w

> fictional movies affect our thinking about real events A creative writing instructor of mine many years ago told a story about watching Saving Private Ryan with his grandfather, who was on the beach at Normandy for the invasion depicted in that movie. Watching the fictional movie had a profound emotional impact on him (driving him to tears) in a way that actual footage of the Normandy invasion never did. His point was that the power of fiction can be much greater than the power of fact. His take wasn't that this was a bad thing (it was a creative writing course, after all), but that fiction in service of the truth is a powerful tool and a useful one. Of course we didn't get into the power of fiction in service of misinformation, but this predated the current scourge of misinformation by about a decade and a half.