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

In fiction, you can make shit up with only a few stipulations. Fiction is generally roughly hacked into two vague catagories: the short story and the novel. Loosely, a short story has a character and that character makes a decision. A novel has one protagonist who makes a series of decisions and eventually changes.

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 roommate. Don't be the person who goes abroad and then writes the story (or stories) about being abroad. Don't forget that the only difference between non-fiction and creative non-fiction is the synthesis of events.

Fantasy/Science Fiction

Genre writing is generally looked down upon on the Knox campus, possibly because no one is writing any good genre fiction. Genre writers do have a newfound gathering place in Quiver, the series of online magazines.

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.