“The Appearance of Real-Life Chaos”

What makes a good work of fiction? 

In the view of Richard Ridley, an author and contributor to Amazon's "CreateSpace," an important element is “the appearance of real-life chaos.”  Subplots, which give depth to characters, are also valuable in that they create familiar disorder, he maintained in a short advice-to-authors blog post entitled “The Resolution Matrix.”

In other words, human events rarely proceed in a predictable, straight-line fashion so to be credible, fiction shouldn’t either.

Ridley’s advice on that front is probably well taken, but his main message is somewhat curious.

Yet More on the Dotted Line

I've written earlier posts on the idea that there is a dotted line between fact and fiction, not because I want to suggest that non-fiction is fundamentally flawed. Like almost everything else in life, it has its shortcomings from time to time, but as a former journalist I'm inclined to believe what I read in credible publications unless I have strong reasons to suspect it isn't correct.

As someone who now dabbles in fiction, it is the other side of the line that is more interesting to me: how should fact be used in fiction?  I will have more to say about that in another positing, but for the moment, I want to call readers' attention to a quote in a recent "Bookends" feature in the Sunday "New York Times" Book Review section.

Fact and Fiction: More About The Dotted Line

The June 20, 2015, "New York Times" carried a lengthy obituary on James Salter, depicted as one of America's most under-appreciated recent novelists and writer of short stories.  The piece is interesting in a couple of respects, but I just want to touch on one of them here.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the dotted line between fact and fiction, which, as a commentator subsequently noted, is not necessarily a problem when fiction makes use of fact, but deceptive when something purporting to be non-fiction is actually made up.