I am not someone who throws around the word ‘self-esteem.’ It is a fictional description.
I populated ‘The Bourne Identity’ with real characters from American history, specifically characters from the Iran-Contra affair, which my father ran the investigation of. But at the heart of it was a fictional character.
When you play a character, you get to see the world through their eyes. Whether it’s a fictional world or a real world, you do get to see somebody else’s point of view, whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy.
Women writers are often conflated with their narrators – as if we can’t consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.
More than 100 years after he first appeared, Holmes remains the template for the fictional detective.
History releases me from my own experience and jogs my fictional imagination.
When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future – those are science fictional questions.
We think that – as kids, you know – that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.
In ‘Shadow Tag,’ Erdrich creates scenes from a fictional marriage, that of two American Indians, Irene and her painter husband Gil, that suggest some of the worst psychological torments and stresses of real life.
I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing.
I feel I’m able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me free to create all of this and to enjoy our family life, stepping away from all the fictional traumas and the dramas. If I write about family in crisis, then I won’t have to live through it, I guess.
I’m drawn towards people who have a little pathos and a little dark side, and I feel the same towards fictional characters.
Some of my characters are drawn from people I know whereas others are an amalgamation of people or one specific person. Sometimes a character is simply fictional. It is always a mix.
I write fiction that reflects Islamic logic: fictional worlds where cause and effect are governed by Muslim rationale. However, my characters do not necessarily behave as ‘good’ Muslims; they are not ideals or role models.
A lot of our songs are based in reality but imagined or using fictional characters as a way to write about something. I think inspiration comes from anything and everything, and it’s filtered through our brains, and it comes out sounding like our band.
I’m really trying to stop setting my plays in this one fictional town in Vermont.
A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.
As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don’t want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.
Once you create a believable fictional universe, you suck the audiences into that world and they tag along for the ride.
We are talking about someone who has lived. It must be honored in every respect. The fictional can take any kind of channel – according to the actor’s marriage to the character.
