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My weird take on fiction is that much of the appeal is that the entire story is just an elaborate analogy to explain true facts about human nature that are othe
by munificent 1y ago
My weird take on fiction is that much of the appeal is that the entire story is just an elaborate analogy to explain true facts about human nature that are otherwise hard to make clear.
You could try to write a non-fiction essay about how being a parent sets you up for potentially the worst pain and most intense grief you can imagine but yet also the experience is so meaningful and rewarding that it's worth it. But that essay would be abstract and wouldn't really hit you in the gut.
Or you could read Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" or watch Arrival which is nominally completely made up about aliens that don't experience time like us and it will convey the same concepts more effectively than an essay could.
- voidhorse 1y agoTotally, it's not a weird take though. It's actually a pretty standard fare account of the purpose of fiction in literary theory that's been with us for a long time. There's actually deeper arguments to be made that storytelling was the first form of human abstraction (we only get the essential details pertinent to the story, all else is abstracted away) and much of what's core to all our practices of representation stems from an originary impetus for storytelling as a means of sharing and replicating knowledge. The prosaic, scientific, nonfictional, non hyperbolic writing we have all gotten used to is kind of a late development.