Reflection #2

In the short essays “Sustained by Fiction While Facing Life’s Facts” by Alice Hoffman and Sue Miller’s “Virtual Reality : The Perils of Seeking a Novelist’s Facts in her Fiction”, both authors address reality vs. imaginary. In fiction writing, we create stories where our plot, characters and settings are dreamed up , but most often they come from places and things that we have seen in reality. When it comes to writing, we can use it as an escape but we also need to have a distance between what is real and what is not. One can often get lost when writing because they take the fake into more account, and lose themselves in the process, whereas if there is a balance things can be drawn clearly.

In Alice Hoffman’s essay she states, “I had the need to get to an ending of something, I was desperate to know how things turned out. In fiction and in life.” (page 97). Many of this author’s personal life affected her writing and the need to find an escape route. I often find, especially in my writing if I am going through a difficult time it would show in my writing. Whether the plot, characters or setting is affected, often depends on ones mood and occurring events in their life. In this essay , the fact that everyone, including herself were affected by a physical illness, gives voice through her characters who go through the same issues as she does.


In Sue Miller’s essay, she explains what it is like when we bring our reality into our fiction. On page 158, she says “What’s hard and what’s interesting- about a story is not so much the thing that’s in it, but what’s made of that thing.”. Often time when we write fiction many just write and write, not considering that each word has to be carefully selected, due to the fact that readers pick up on what is written. Many readers also pick up on whether or not the authors words has meaning, or are empty words. On page 159 she says, “It is that struggle for meaning that lets the writer escape tyranny of what really happened and begin to dream his fictional dream.” Many writers often struggle, or have writers block when coming to their stories, because one may lose themselves in a quest to find who they are.

Sue Miller and Alice Hoffman are alike in their ideologies that we sometimes have to draw a line between what is real and what is imaginary. Often times when we write we want others to feel the same place that we are coming from. On page 98, Alice Hoffman says “ I wrote because that was who I was at the core.”. When I write stories, even though I’m creating a whole new tale using lies, I still want myself to be present in my stories at a balance. As Sue Miller states on page 159, “For the true writer, though however close the events maybe to his life, there is some distance, some remove that allows for the shaping of the work.” This statement is a realization that even though what we go through can affect our stories, if there isn’t a distance the story can become an emotional blob that doesn’t clearly speak to the audience.

In both authors essays, I concluded that one thing to look out for when writing is knowing when to draw the line. This line would consist of knowing when to add details from my life, but also knowing when not to go to far. When coming to learning to balance this in writing, would be tricky since many of my pieces show relevance of what is occurring in my life, but one simple trick would be to plan ahead of time the details I am willing to share. Fiction writing is mostly a package that we come up with woven through lies to make a believable and relatable story, so when writing these stories, if we lose ourselves in the creation of the story, it can inhibit the stories potential.