Fiction

• 1. Introduction

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  Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, that portrays individuals, events, or places that are imaginary, or imagined in ways that depart from the real. By design, these portrayals sit at odds with fact, history, or plausibility. A listener might assume the word simply means novels. It does, in the narrow traditional sense: prose narratives, often novels, novellas, and short stories. But that narrow door opens onto something far wider. The same imaginative act drives live theatrical performances, films, television programs, radio dramas, comics, role-playing games, and video games. What ties such different forms together? Why does an audience agree to believe a story it knows is not true? And how did invented narrative pull free of history and myth to become an art of its own? Those are the questions worth chasing.

• 2. Artifice And Belief

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  Literary critic James Wood argues that "fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude." A story must be invented, yet it must also carry some believable weight for the audience that receives it. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge captured the reader's side of that bargain in his idea of the willing suspension of disbelief. The fictionality of a work is usually expressed openly, so the audience comes expecting a departure from reality rather than only factually accurate portrayals. Because a fictional work is understood not to adhere strictly to the real world, its themes stay open to interpretation, including how it relates to real issues or events. For centuries, scholars have inquired about what experiencing fiction does to people, and how an audience is changed by what it discovers there. The infinite possibilities of fiction can even point toward stranger ideas, such as there being no criterion to measure constructs of reality, or the impossibility of fully knowing reality. Some works leave the known physical universe behind entirely, building an independent fictional universe within its own context. The craft of constructing such an imaginary world has its own name: worldbuilding.

• 3. The Line With Reality

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  Creators of non-fiction assume responsibility for presenting information, and sometimes opinion, grounded only in historical and factual reality. That responsibility marks the dividing line. The distinction may be best defined from the viewpoint of the audience. A work counts as non-fiction when its people, settings, and plot are perceived as entirely real, and as fiction when it deviates from reality in any of those areas. Yet the boundary blurs, especially in the modern era. Experimental storytelling genres press against it, including some postmodern fiction, autofiction, and creative nonfiction such as non-fiction novels and docudramas. There is also the deliberate literary fraud of falsely marketing fiction as nonfiction. Even most fiction usually holds some grounding in truth, or truth from a certain point of view. Every type of fiction invites its audience to explore real-world ideas, called themes, through a setting or series of events that stays distinct from reality. That invitation runs through the genres too, which split along how far they stray from the plausible.

• 4. Speculative And Realistic

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  Speculative fiction is the umbrella genre marked by a lesser degree of adherence to realistic or plausible individuals, events, or places. It may depict an entirely imaginary universe, or one where the laws of nature do not strictly apply, which is often the sub-genre of fantasy. It may take true historical moments and conclude them in a completely imaginary way, or follow them with major invented events, the genre of alternative history. Or it may depict impossible technology, or technology that defies current scientific understanding, the genre of science fiction. Realistic fiction adheres more closely, telling stories whose basic setting of time and location is in fact real, with events that could believably happen in the real world. One of its sub-genres is historical fiction, centered on true major events and time periods in the past. The drive to make stories feel faithful to reality, and the 19th-century artistic movement that vigorously promoted that approach, is called literary realism, which takes in works of both fiction and non-fiction.

• 5. From Homer To Cervantes

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  Storytelling has existed in all human cultures, each blending different elements of truth and fiction. Early fiction stayed closely associated with history and myth. Greek poets such as Homer, Hesiod, and Aesop built fictional stories carried first through oral storytelling, then in writing. Prose fiction was developed in Ancient Greece, shaped by the storytelling traditions of Asia and Egypt. Distinctly fictional work was not recognized as separate from historical or mythological stories until the imperial period. Plasmatic narrative, following entirely invented characters and events, grew out of ancient drama and New Comedy. Early fiction often took the shape of a series of strange and fantastic adventures, as writers tested the limits of the form. Milesian tales were an early example in Ancient Greece and Italy. As the craft developed, relatable characters and plausible scenarios were emphasized to better connect with the audience, drawing in elements such as romance, piracy, and religious ceremonies. Heroic romance arose in medieval Europe, carrying supernatural elements and chivalry. The structure of the modern novel was developed by Miguel de Cervantes with Don Quixote in the early-17th century. The novel became a primary medium of fiction in the 18th and 19th centuries, often tied to Enlightenment ideas such as empiricism and agnosticism. Realism developed as a literary style at this time. New mass media followed in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, including popular-fiction magazines and early film, and interactive fiction arrived later still through video games.

• 6. The Bones Of Story

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  Character, conflict, narrative mode, plot, setting, and theme: these elements define all works of narrative, including all narrative fiction. Characters are the individuals inside a story. Conflicts are the tension or problem that drives their thoughts and actions. Narrative modes are the ways a story is communicated. Plots are the sequence of events. Settings place the story in time and space. Themes are the deeper messages or interpretations an audience is left to discuss and reflect upon. The traditional formats built from these bones run long: novels, novellas, short stories, fables, legends, myths, fairy tales, epic and narrative poetry, and plays, including operas, musicals, dramas, puppet plays, and various theatrical dances. The list keeps growing to comic books, animated cartoons, stop motions, anime, manga, films, video games, radio programs, and television comedies and dramas. The Internet reshaped how these are created and distributed. It called into question the feasibility of copyright as a way to ensure royalties reach copyright holders, while digital libraries such as Project Gutenberg made public domain texts more readily available. Cheap home computers, the network, and the creativity of users produced new forms: interactive computer games, computer-generated comics, blog fiction delivered as flash fiction or serial blog, and collaborative fiction written sequentially by different authors or revised by anyone using a wiki. Countless forums for fan fiction let loyal followers of specific fictional realms create and distribute derivative stories.

• 7. Literary Versus Genre

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  The definition of literary fiction is controversial. It may mean any work of fiction in written form, or something narrower: a work that does not fit neatly into an established genre, that is character-driven rather than plot-driven, that examines the human condition, that uses language in an experimental or poetic fashion, or that is considered serious as a work of art. The label is often treated as a synonym for literature in the narrow sense of writing regarded as an art form. Yet literary and genre fiction are not mutually exclusive, and major literary figures have used science fiction, crime fiction, and romance to create works of literature. John Updike resisted the term. He lamented that "the category of 'literary fiction' has sprung up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books," adding, "I'm a genre writer of a sort. I write literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit." On The Charlie Rose Show he argued the term limited him and his expectations, since to him all his works were literary simply because "they are written in words." Neal Stephenson framed a present-day split: literary authors are frequently supported by patronage, often employed at a university, their positions sustained by critical acclaim rather than book sales, while genre fiction writers tend to support themselves through sales. Literary fiction often carries social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition, favoring introspective, in-depth character studies. Terrence Rafferty notes that "literary fiction, by its nature, allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way."

• 8. When Life Imitates Art

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  Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, and only in 1969 did astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to land on the Moon. That gap between an invented technology and its arrival is the engine of science fiction. Other genres pull in the opposite direction. Historical fiction places imaginary characters into real events, as in Sir Walter Scott's 1814 novel Waverley, where the fictional Edward Waverley meets Bonnie Prince Charlie and takes part in the Battle of Prestonpans. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a 1990 series of short stories about the Vietnam War, shows how a story rooted in fact may add and subtract to make itself more interesting. Fantasy goes further still, with supernatural, magical, or scientifically impossible elements, as in Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, where creators introduce dragons and fairies. These prose forms are also measured by length: a short story commonly runs fewer than 7,500 words, a novella from 17,500 to 40,000 words, with examples such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from 1886 and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from 1899, and a novel 40,000 words or more. Drawing real events or people into imagined ones is called fictionalization, narrowed to dramatization for visual works in theatre and film. The reverse, where the physical world seems shaped by past fiction, is the phrase "life imitating art," popularly associated with Oscar Wilde. Charlie Chaplin embodied the whole idea in 1940, portraying the despot Adenoid Hynkel in the satirical film The Great Dictator, a figure who fictionalized real wartime events to present fascist leaders as humorously irrational and pathetic.