Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.
Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.
Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
Fiction has subversive potential. People let it into their minds, like the Trojan Horse. They don't know what's inside. You hook them with the story, and God can work below the level of their consciousness. Fiction can be propaganda for evil or convey a theme that impacts people for good.
I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.
Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.
I think fiction, for me, is a way of trying to understand why people do the things they do - and trying to explain what is, at heart, illogical.