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.
