![]() ![]() Indeed, the very techniques and effects that thrill us in fiction and are now increasingly channelled by modern-day long-form reportage, make us suspicious - we wonder if the writer is making some stuff up.įor the work of non-fiction to be good, truthful and solid, we feel it should essentially be duplicatable by another intelligent human being entering the same field. This limits expectations of the genre and makes its purveyors more dependent than independent. ![]() We come to a work of fiction sceptical that it can make a world real and meaningful, even essential, for us, and ask to be won over by the writer's vivid and imaginative use of his or her freedom in the realms of language, structure and plot.īut when it comes to narrative non-fiction, the writer is both fulfilled and constrained by his responsibility towards a world that precedes the book and is the reason for its being written. To the demanding reader of fiction, literary genius resides for the most part in the experience of surprise, in being disarmed. It is much easier to decide what literary genius is in fiction than in non-fiction. ![]()
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