The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.
Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.
The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character.
One reason we love fiction is because stories have a comforting shape. They provide a resolution that's lacking in our regular lives.
To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.
A novel, even a social realist one, can't simply be a comprehensive rendering of what is. A novel requires a special angle or approach, whether in structure or language or theme, to justify itself.
A lot of times, the inspiration for a novel is a messy bird's nest of shiny things. Little things that don't make a whole lot of sense or that, no matter how hard you look, cannot be found directly in the finished book.
I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.