One Learns More by Writing Fiction

One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie. Aristotle put it this way in his Poetics: Poetry is more philosophical than history. And the word philosophical meant considerably more in Aristotle’s time than it does in ours, it meant more true and more real in the deepest possible sense of those words. I’d agree with that, I’d say that history opens us to the possible, whereas fiction, by opening us to the unreal, leads us to what is essential in reality. Mind you, this doesn’t mean that fiction is a higher, more noble genre. The quality of any literary text depends on formal rather than referential values. Nonfiction—think of Gibbon’s, Montaigne’s, Baudelaire’s prose—can produce works of art as great as any novel.

FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY