Fiction/Fulghum

Here's some stuff borrowed from Robert Fulghum ... on his experiences with fiction ... i find it very interesting:

THE NOVEL

As with the life of the individual, the novel carries the seed of its end in its beginning. The answer to the reader's question, "What finally happens?" is always the same: everybody dies and the world falls into the Sun. But prolonging the end as long as possible is the novelist's privilege. That is why "THIRD WISH" finishes with the word "To be continued." I know how it ends. But I do not know what happens in the meantime. I write to find out.

I have chosen to write a novel because I choose to continue having adventure in my life. I write to create fleshy memories – to not have only the gnawed bones of the past to sustain me in old age. And even those bones are a reassembled skeleton of what really happened. Our autobiographies are themselves as much a product of the creative imagination as any work of fiction. Our history is what we need it to be. We are the heroes of our own situation comedy. To be alive and human is to live on a tightrope. To retain balance, you must keep moving.

"The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: 'Things are not as simple as you think.' That is the novel's eternal truth." Milan Kundera said that in The Art of the Novel.

A successful novel is a conspiracy between the reader and the writer. The reader's imagination is required to complete the writer's. The reader must be willing to be active – to do some work – to take some responsibility. If the reader does his work well, every novel is unique. The writer and the reader can both declare:

I am the life.
I am the work.
I am the audience.
I am the singer.
And I the song.

We conspire to collaborate.