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My earliest writing was always fiction. It became an outlet for my creativity, an outlet I could turn my skill in fantasies and daydreams into something more useful, or at least more accepted. And through it, I learned a great deal of freedom in writing, the form known as prose, a sort of blank-verse poetic narrative. In so many ways, my fiction allowed me not only creative outlet, but the ability to participate in a world that circumstances and finances would not allow me to join just yet. Others went on vacations, flew the world, saw the sights. I imagined them. I made myself important through my characters, gave myself adventures and excitement of the kind that was rare in the real world. Much as someone reads a romance of old to be the hero, the pirate, the bandit, the soldier, I wrote myself these worlds. It was escape from the boredom of a dull teenagers' life.

Before I knew it, my twenties crept up upon me, and and before I knew it, I was immersed into a "real world" of my own. It was nothing so glamorous as the worlds I created, and in many cases pointless, but as I learned more and lived more in that world, I grew more and more to appreciate nonfiction. Why make up stories when we had such great and tragic ones to see every day? I could see greater suffering, greater betrayal, greater love, all on the streets I walked. And there was more market for those stories too. I felt I was truly involved in something of importance, Fiction suddenly became a great lie, for those who could not stick it out to learn the truth, for the lazy writer. The easy way out, and being a lie, also a pointless one. Who needed fiction, really?

Unfortunately, the more commercial my writing became, the less flexible and pleasant to my ear it became too. Nonfiction has a very binding, dry attachment to proper grammar. As I groaned under the chains of strict, rather Germanic rules -- many of which violated the very truth of language that was spoken on the streets I walked -- I began to feel empty. Something was missing, and I didn't know quite what.

Even as I had lost a taste for fiction, I was missing it. And movies like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as a series of very well written anime titles sent to me by a close friend, were enthralling me. Why? They're made up, they're stories, they're lies. No matter how enticing the worlds they paint are, what can one really learn from them? You'll never be a Hobbit or a King. No-one wields a sword and fixes the world these days. You can't fight the Nobles and bring Paradise to reality. You can't fly through space catching bad-guys and trying to find the woman you love, and defeating a man who was once your comrade and now was your hated enemy. What value was there to stories which made heros of people that you or I could never be? or even be similar to?

And yet. And yet my missing that writing. And yet the seductiveness of those worlds. Was it just me running away, or was there more?

***

Summer came, and I registered for school. I had not done schoolwork for six years, and had not been in a school environment for double that. I would be an older student, a "Non-Trad" as they are now known. But I wasn't nearly so worried about fitting in as making sure I could afford it, making sure my financial aid would stretch, because like all artists and wannabe artists, I was not well off. To secure the maximum amount of aid I could qualify for, I needed one more class, so as to become full time. There were only two classes that fit my schedule, one was English Composition, something that I really needed for my work as a journalist, and the other was English Literature. As fate had it, the first was full, the second was not.

I had had to go to Dallas for a convention during the first week of school, and since I was therefore missing my first two classes, the teacher had sent me the syllabus outlining the basics of the class, as well as the lesson plan. I had expected the usual sort of lit class, the kind you get in high school where you read something, then you write enough to prove you read it. Instead, I got a class that delved into the fundamentals of fiction, the why. Being proposed to me was the precept that fiction was merely another form, another medium to tell a story, another communication method. All very obvious, but what wasn't obvious was the defense of it's value; fiction was not a mock-reality, as I had so long felt. The lies, as I had put it, were not to deceive, not to give us worlds we would long for but never be able to inhabit, but shorthand. In the same way that fiction was free to abandon the restraints of proper grammar to achieve an effect that was more efficient at delivering it's message than a non-fiction sentence would, so, too, it abandons the logic and necessity of the factual world, to deliver it's message. Contrary to my escapist thoughts, fiction was meant to educate, teach, inspire, and communicate, just as any other method of writing, or just as any art form for that matter. Fiction is a giant metaphor. Through it can be said things that cannot be said in any other way, through it can be learned things that cannot be learned any other way. The parable, though fiction, was good enough for the Lord, so its lies are not falsehoods, only the efficiency of wit.

The value of fiction, then is the flexibility it has to tell stories too large and too complex to grasp in any other way.

"I tried to write shorterbut I ran out of time"~Mark Twain

"I tried to write shorter
but I ran out of time"
~Mark Twain