Fact or fiction?

Same thing, almost. They're both things we make up. It's just that we assume facts always represent reality, and fiction doesn't. Kind of a silly distinction, I think. Although I suppose it's conducive to our sanity to believe in facts to some degree.

I've been watching a lot of factors regarding this thought converge in my life recently. For example, I'm currently taking a course on Alan Moore's treatment of the Victorian era in his work. An interesting point that came up was how Moore uses Victorian fiction as source for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen like a historical fiction writer uses historical texts. The biggest difference between the two being that the historical texts represent history as it was recorded, but it's not the same as having actually been there, whereas Victorian novels ARE what happened. When we pick up a copy of, say, Dracula, we get more or less the exact same text that its first readers in the Victorian era got. The fictional text is, in a way, a better representative of what people experienced in the era it was published.

Then there's my other English lit course, which focuses on Paradise Lost--a fictional adaptation inspired by mythology which many believed (and some still believe) to be an accurate representation of human history. As interesting as the Abrahamic ways of interpreting the world seem, it's always so much easier for me to interact with that set of beliefs as fiction.

Really, I think I interact with most second-hand information I'm presented with as though it's fiction. Sometimes I actively decide to assume that something truly is exactly the way someone else says it is, but not when I feel like I don't have to. This mode of thinking makes another class I'm taking that focuses partially on journalism a little bit hilarious at times.

Not that I don't believe good journalism is possible and valuable. I do. (Although incidents like the Boston marathon bombing sometimes result in many popular news sources challenging that belief.) Nonetheless, I don't really read most news articles as information, but rather as what someone else is telling me about something they've (hopefully) researched. It might be a decently accurate representation of reality, but it's not like I usually have enough first-hand experience to know that for sure (and if I did--which would probably require me to somehow be multiple people at once--there wouldn't be much point in me reading the news article for its content alone.) This doesn't bother me much because most of what gets covered in the news doesn't really affect me directly, anyway.

Because of this outlook, I have very little interest in writing factual reports and papers. It's not in our nature as individuals to be capable of being truly objective, so even if what I'm saying is broadly applicable enough so it accurately reflects whatever reality I'm writing about for all of my readers, why bother? Why not just admit that everything we say and think is subjective (albeit often times in a way that either does or should apply to most other humans), and that the only truth we have any hope of telling with anywhere near perfect accuracy is our own?

Our own truths--what we feel, what we perceive--aren't bound by facts. They just are. Sometimes using facts can help other people understand them, but they just get in the way if you concern yourself with them too much. In fact, the more I get away from some of the facts of my own life, the easier it is to express some semblance of my truth.