Fiction

"For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction." -Lord Byron

Fiction

At a Liberal Arts institution such as Knox it seems that everyone can or wants to tell you about some kind of fiction. There are many kinds of fiction which tend to be defined along discipline lines. Let us examine the various types;

Fiction in Writing

It used to be, at least as far back as 2004, that if it wasn't poetry that you were writing you belonged in a fiction class. However, this is no longer the case. Prose has been broken down into (at least) three types; Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, and Fantasy/Science Fiction (the final delineation has been combined because no one cares). Fiction itself works differently in each mode of expression.

Fiction

If you are writing plain old fiction you are free to make up pretty much whatever you'd like. There are, however, some limitations. The inclusion of any of the following are grounds for being labeled Fantasy: unicorns, rivers of sky or of fear, gigantic robots, wizards, or anything else that you thought was really cool at Saturday Night's Old Main LARP (or any other LARP for that matter). Within these parameters feel free to explore, but keep in mind the inherent caveat that all of your writing (until you graduate) falls into a further categorization of student fiction. Thus it won't be taken at all seriously and your quaint imitations of maturity will appear (as they truly are) absolutely transparent.

Creative Non-Fiction

Here your fictional license as a writer is slightly suspended: don't go out of state. It is important to keep in mind here that whatever you write in a non-fiction setting has to appear believable and has to have happened to you, not your pal, sister, or room mate. So, while it is acceptable to fabricate stories about abusive parents/relationships keep in mind that it is the responsibility of the workshop to examine your body for signs of scars related to your gory clothes-hanger episode.

Fantasy/Science Fiction

If you have no concern for truth or relation to the real world, Fantasy is for you. Then again, if this genre truly were for you, you'd be too busy feeding clouds to your pet Kraken to discover TheWikiFire.

Fiction in the Social Sciences

The Social Sciences, at least since the calamitous dawn of post-modernism, have been primarily concerned with the fiction perpetuated by the man to disenfranchise, imperialize, schematize, and various other forms of the suffix -ize a minority of peoples. This fiction is your enemy, rally against it as you might you are still inevitably subservient to it or existentially rattled by its unraveling. Yes, fiction is your doom as well as your legacy, like some sort of textual Ouroboros. This description of fiction is mainly addressed to Anthropology and Sociology fields of study in their never ending quest for cultural Truth, but can be applied to the History department as well. The only difference here being that if you're a historian you have no misconceptions about the fiction that you currently purport to be the truth, congratulations.

Fiction in the Sciences

Sure there is fiction in the sciences (let's not get started with Psychology) just open a text book. If its a decent text it will attempt to outline the history of the science, painstakingly pointing out the fictions of previous scientific systems as compared with the objective truth of current modes of thought. You can't run an experiment without using copious amounts of fiction. Every weight, measurement, and calibration is an age old extrapolation of the length of an ever-changing meter shit-holed somewhere in the south of France. Good luck justifying adding grams of sodium-benzoate to a 5 molar aqueous solution when both the gram and the molar measurement are idealizations of imaginary amounts. Yes, fiction fucks science as well.