1. Janet Ursel says:

    Lovely post! I’ve actually been thinking about this lately: while novels must be unflinchingly honest, they can’t be real life. My real life is a single thread in the tapestry, taken out of context it doesn’t form a picture. And it would make a crummy story. (No memoir planned for me!) But in the big picture, it has a role to play. That big picture is far too large to cram into a novel. So we must be miniaturists, shrinking real life to a scale that we can handle. A character arc and a well-built plot should have a symmetry and closure that we rarely find in real life. Art is artificial, after all, by definition. We leave out as much as possible to make a story shine through and the meaning emerge.

  2. notleia says:

    Well, you could say that the one of the major facets of literary Modernism is that sometimes (or often) people’s suffering ends up being meaningless.

    But there’s a conflict in of itself, struggling to make sense of someone’s death and wanting it to have meaning, but the evidence points to it being purposeless. Or at the end of it all, it’s all so much noise when that person is irreversibly dead way too soon.

    Or you could take the opposite tack and have someone welcome the illusion of a meaningful death and their struggled (or lack thereof) to maintain it in the face of evidence to the contrary. Oh, there’s a commentary on patriotism (maybe a virtue, but not one of the higher) to be made there. Though I have a feeling someone’s done that, somewhere.

What do you think?