How close to our real lives can fiction be?

Question

"Truth is stranger than fiction." This is *the* reference quote for most folks but, what purpose does it serve other than just sounding good?

I think stories no matter how reality-based will remain stories. In fiction, everything has a reason- someone's death, someone's success, someone's pain... The writer has to justify nearly everything in a story.

Can it be compared to real lives where things have no reason or order.... or do they?

P.S. I just made up this question after reading the preface of a story book. I hope you like the question.

Answer 1

Fiction cannot replace reality, yet it is called a 'mirror' to life. Fiction is not real but it is close, real close to interest us and to understand reality

A writer may work with a plot--- series of events in a story. “What happens” in a story, must evolve or develop--- internal or external. He has the 'power' to MANIPULATE the events as you can see from the recurrence of 'coincidences' in Thomas Hardy novels. In real life things are not as neatly pushed underneath the rug. Yet even the writer himself is bound by the characters he creates.

The core of fiction has always been the story-teller's observation of human behaviour, and thus we marvel at how "lifelike" are his characters or how "true-to-life" are their experiences. Even myth and caricature build upon a thorough knowledge of human characteristics. The Greek epic heroes, as well as the gods, are plagued with all our human foibles, and Charles Dickens's most grotesque characters exaggerate our most familiar human traits. One literary critic has put it: Literature portrays almost every conceivable human action, thought, attitude, emotion, situation, problem, our relationships, depicting our attractions and regrets, our fantasies and disillusionments, our coercions and compromises. If we will look into the mirror of fiction through the powerful lenses, we might come to understand ourselves more clearly

Even in the eccentric world of a writer like Franz Kafka, a story lives for us and catches us up in its artifice because we see ourselves and our predicaments in its characters

And such a personal recognition can delight us -- or disturb us profoundly -- with its accuracy. Suspecting this, Hamlet instructed a troupe of actors to touch his uncle's conscience with a scene from a play, and in his famous speech he defined the power of fiction to make us perceive ourselves more clearly.

Writers see the world around with new clarity and in new detail, and analyze characters and relationships with more insight. All kinds and combinations of these characters lived in the pages of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway, and many, many more.

I agree with you that fiction is not reality but we are essentially interested in it coz it is more real than the reality and helps us understand reality. We may not understand a complex character in real life but when we read a novel, we may get an insight into his quirky mind..... for eg. Faulkner's 'Sound & Fury' (a tale told by an Idiot)

Answer 2

Truthfully, my life may be stranger than fiction. I don't believe a fictional story would be any more interesting. The only thing that could change in a fictional story of my life would be the point of view. You see, I live my life. No one else actually has as close a perspective as the narrator of a fictional story or a second person would have. In fiction, someone CAN make sense of an event. In real life, I may do that for myself, but my opinion is still open to interpretation by the rest of the world. In fiction, that opinion becomes the reality.

____________
By the way, I did like the question. You said, "In fiction, everything has a reason- someone's death, someone's success, someone's pain... The writer has to justify nearly everything in a story." That may be why we sometimes come away feeling "let down" by our experiences. They can't be justified or explained. We live them and can never really relate them (except as stories) to others adequately. Once they are stories, they achieve a fictional status that makes them almost belong to the character who we've become rather than ourselves.

Answer 3

Check out what H.G. Wells and other early sci-fi writers did. Things in their books didn't exist in their times, but do today. I can't think of any specific examples, but in a way they predicted modern technologies. So I think that maybe it is a chicken or egg relationship. Fiction becomes reality in someways, and reality can be stranger than fiction in others, providing that the reality has not already been ficionalized, such as a fictional story of a giant tuna, but then finding such a tuna. If the tuna was found first, it would be stranger than a story written about it afterwards, but if the story was written first, and then the tuna was found, it already has some measure of acceptance, so would not be so strange.

Answer 4

Sometimes, even the most trivial can be profound. Trivial to some, a profound statement to others.

I am a rabbit. In my professional life, my frustrations and day to day activities and interactions are characterized by Alice's adventures down the rabbit hole. You have reference #1 -- my life is a twisted journey down the rabbit hole.

I am a Diva. I have adoring fans everywhere I go -- an oxymoron in that I have very few real friends. You have reference #2 -- "I am not a doctor, but I play one on TV"

I am either viewing you with slight regard or with a loaded gun pointed between you eyes at exceptionally close range.

- Having been a US Army Sniper, I don't need to be that close to you if I mean business. You have reference #3 -- It's a message to those whom would seek to attack -- "Beware, be very aware"

- Slight Regard ? Nothing could be further from the truth for I consider my friends, once "in" to be "IN" my life. You have reference #4 -- 'I got your back.'

Sexy. If you know the character that I have adopted, you know that there is a profound, unexplainable attraction to another that cannot be waivered. You have reference #5 -- People only think I'm flirting, but it is their imagination at work, not mine.

Fiction, my friend, is closer to reality than you might believe. What was a dream a hundred years ago is now a joke -- planes fly faster, cars drive faster than could have been imagined years ago.

Progress, real progress, has it's roots in fiction -- what was fiction yesterday is reality today, and so on.

Fiction is closer to truth than it appears.

Answer 5

I believe fiction can be "truer" to life than the experience in reality, because it necessarily eschews the irrelevant details or "noise" and focusses on the significant, both in plot and character - or at least what is significant from the viewpoint adopted for the story and the characters in it. We do that in real life, anyway, composing the "story" that makes sense of our experience, to us. So fiction is like painting. No matter how deceptive the illusion of detail and "reality", a painter must omit an enormous amount of detail to achieve it. And, whether by "abstract" or "representation" an artist seeks to capture the significant character of the subject. I think it was Manet who said painting was not representation but re-presentation - by which I believe he meant aiming for that "ahah!" of fresh insight, deeper than the superficial. I paint, sculpt, and write, and have no great faith in what most people call "reality"! Humanity has a deeper eye, which one might call imagination - though few use it except to obscure their understanding with preconceptions, like a veil.

Answer 6

Have you read: Shakespeare's Tempest, The Arabian Nights, and Don Quixote? All of these works (and many other great works) suggest that real life is a story. That is, their question is "How close to fiction can our real lives be?" It sounds strange, but when you immerse yourself deeply enough into their world, you wonder whether indeed this life is real or not! Then read Plato!!!

Great question, by the way.

Answer 7

In real life you have a set of people, each governed by their own set of circumstances, each having their own views, their own inputs and reacting and basing judgment for any issue generally as they choose to.

In the case of fiction, the actors react according to the writer or set of writers who generally take up a set of circumstances, bring them to a common act and have each actor react based on what the writer conceives should be the reactions for each character. Many writers are good at this, but ultimately it is the ideas of one or a group of writers, and not the multitude of characters in real life who could react differently as opposed to reactions in the story.

I am a writer, but I write on brands and companies and stuff like that. Very often to cut an interview to the required length I have had to improvise and put the interviewee's opinions in my own words.
Your Q is good!

Answer 8

Sometimes fiction can be VERY close to our real lives. The movie Superman Returns was so close to my life that I had to leave during parts of it to keep my little neighbor who I took from seeing me cry... especially Superman being in love with someone who was in a relationship. Other parallels were the beating that Superman took from Lex Luthor and his gang. It reminded me of when I stood up for Christ in the 60s when religion wasn't cool. Superman getting stabbed in the kidney with Kryptonite reminded me of my kidney surgery in 6th grade. There were many others, but those stuck out most in my mind.

Cal-el

Answer 9

stories have an origin. they may be figment of one's active imagination or they may be taken from events and people that have really existed. actually, there is a fine line between what is based from fact and from fiction. if you go crimelibrary.com, you will see how uh, sick our reality is and you may even meet the men who inspired the characters of "buffalo bill" and "dr. hannibal" from the movie silence of the lambs.

Answer 10

My life wouild make a great story. But I have not seen any fiction that compares to real life. Pem