A Note on Fiction

Allow me to start with a quote. It is from The Libertine, performed by Johnny Depp as John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester.

“Life has no purpose. It is everywhere undone by arbitrariness. I do this, and it matters not a jot if I do the opposite. But in the playhouse, every action, good or bad, has its consequence. Drop a handkerchief and it will return to smother you.”

Let us consider a phenomenon while we’re at it. It’s that fans of murder-mystery novels, after at least a good deal of experience with the genre, will eventually gravitate toward true crime books, forsaking murder-mystery all together. The most common reason I’ve heard is that the true crime stories are unbelievable, perverse… and violent in comparison. The fictional crimes of humanity are well stated and, very often, well reasoned. The crimes committed are rarely so awful as to be reviled. True crime is to murder mystery as an R rating is to a PG rating. Now I come to my point: Life as we know it is unpredictable, highly elastic, and ultimately out of our control. Fiction, in all its forms, has a rhythm and a purpose. It is warm, it is calculating, and it is rational.
Warm rationality is an odd description, is it not? If you think about every love story you’ve ever read, warmth, pain, and indeed happiness, are commonplace. Where is the destitution of spirit? Where are the hiccups you just never recover from? In a love story, you will never see the protagonist pass by his or her true love by accident or misfortune or any other means and never experience that love. The writer will not present a willing reader with a story where nothing happens and the characters are all severely unhappy. I assure you these things do happen. How do you know the one you’re with is your true love? Do you know? Your true love could very well have been that woman at the supermarket with the many tattoos you’ll never see again or the man you once knew in second grade that was murdered by his parents.
That is, if you believe in that sort of thing.
You can never really know anything. Fiction is the human brain trying to make sense of our goings on. It is our way of compensating for the unknown. By providing some rationality to the unknowable, we are making the world more sensible to us. Writers have such a narrow view of reality. The word perspective comes into play here. Let us pretend we’re in a large room, say, in a store. Any store you like, that’s where we are now. A multitude of people are standing around, shopping or chatting, it doesn’t really matter what they’re doing. What matters is why. Why are they there? Why are you there? There is something that brings all of us together in that room, something that none of us will ever know. Perhaps we are mostly in that store to buy something. But what are we buying and for what reason? What about the younger fellows that are there to look at younger ladies? They won’t buy anything, but they’re there. You cannot peer into another’s mind. According to the writer of your story, the reason you are here with these people is fate. That all encompassing thing known as fate. A writer may try to conjure up reasons like “this person is in this store because it is the closest one to that persons living space” or “their car broke down outside”. Anything. When you are creating a story, it serves no purpose to account for all these occurrences. Fate is the only reasonable measure in a story. In life, any crazy shit can happen to you or be done by you at any time.
Despite all this, fiction is a grand thing. It provides us a window to the fantastical. It is an instrument of life and reason. Words are given power by the order in which they are strung. Fiction has the same power to awe as reality. It just happens to be a bit harder to construct the story. The opposite is true in life. There are great stories all around us. Trying to put them into words, that is the greatest challenge.