Fiction, part 1

Thanks to everyone who came out to support local authors at Page 1 Books on Saturday! I had a lot of fun getting to know you.

Don’t forget to submit to Mavguard while you still can – less than a month left to get your work in!

And now begins the week of fiction. Or rather, a study of fiction.

What is fiction?

Well, the answer isn’t as easy as you might think. That’s because when most of us think of fiction, we think of a particular genre of fiction. Itself, fiction is a blanket term. It covers every form within it, but when we’re talking about plain fiction, we’re still talking about a specific thing.

Confused yet?

Here, I’ll break it down.

Genre fiction is classifications, like science fiction, horror fiction, mysteries, thrillers, etc. They’re forms of fiction, however, and aren’t actually classified as fiction when we’re talking about genre.

Fiction itself is essentially a term that stands for stories about normal people doing normal things in normal lives, except they’re all, well, fictional. Fiction doesn’t involve horror, nor mystery, nor fantasy. It’s just a story, one filled with made up people but real places and real things. When we write fiction, we don’t write about aliens or serial killers or anything of the sort. We write about doctors seeing their patients, mothers caring for their children, people picking out a dog at the shelter.

Coming from someone who writes science fiction and fantasy, it sounds a little boring. But I promise, it can really be a lot of fun. I’ve written a few straight fiction things in the past, and some of them have turned out quite well.

Basically, fiction is a story that’s not biographical or historical, but is based on normal-like people and is set in the real world. There’s lot we can do with that, as you’ll see in the next two posts throughout this week. So don’t forget to stop back in and find out my suggestions on the best ways to use fiction and things you should never try to make it do.

Happy Monday!

[love]

{Rani Divine}