Fiction and Prediction

“No one would write a word, if he remembered how much fiction eventually comes true.” -- Richard Powers, Generosity.

Does your fiction writing predict your own future?

Many fiction writers have found this to be so -- but how to make sense of the phenomenon?

Well... any character you invent contains aspects of yourself. Plotting involves realistically forecasting a character's fate. (While to make similarly objective calculations regarding your own future would be emotionally impossible...)

So on the page you unconsciously create the person you'll eventually turn into? Powers is right that it's better not to think too much about this.

Powers once told Sven Birkerts, “I’ve often thought that each book is, in some ways, an attempt to answer those questions that I failed to answer in previous books. Even at the moment of delivery, most of the captives escape. The desire to go back in and write again is the desire to come to terms with those things that eluded closure.” This brings us back to novel writing as a process of self-integration, an irritating concept that I've already touched on.

I predict that in 2010 I'll be posting to this blog four times a week, instead of five times. A very happy New Year to you all!