The Great Fiction of the 'Real' World
An Essay on the Creative Authority of the Artist in a World Gone Literal
This essay is based on a comment I left on Elif Shafak’s page:
The Great Fiction of the 'Real' World
An Essay on the Creative Authority of the Artist in a World Gone Literal
There is no greater fiction than the so-called “real” world—this realm of anxious and disputed consensus and concrete certainties in which the so-called “other citizens” place their trust. Their concerns are urgent, their opinions strident, their allegiances fiercely guarded—yet beneath all of it lies a childlike faith in the idea that what they see, touch, and purchase is somehow more true than what is imagined, intuited, or composed in the quietude of the studio. But this is the greatest delusion of all. Everything human is a fiction—language, money, law, identity, history, even the ticking measure of time. All of it is imagined, structured, narrated, and believed into existence. And anyone who truly reads fiction—who knows the arc of a character, the breath of a scene, the tragic flaw, the sacred reversal—can see the truth of that.
Fiction is not the opposite of reality. It is the engine of it.
To write or to read a fictional story is to engage in a higher mode of perception—a grasp of the world not as it claims to be, but as it feels and unfolds just beneath the surface. Fiction gives us not just events but the meaning of events. It does not merely name a thing, but reveals what that thing does to a person, how it bends light around it, how it complicates or clarifies the soul. The act of reading fiction is an exercise in empathy, imagination, subtlety, and contradiction. It allows us to inhabit what it means to be another person, in another place, under different conditions—perhaps more truthfully than the sanitized, flattened narratives offered by the "news" or the market.
We live in a time where nearly all value is translated into the language of profit. And yet, what is most valuable in life—beauty, meaning, love, mystery, sorrow, revelation—refuses to be bought or sold. The creative spirit, the artist, the storyteller—these are not entertainers hired to soothe the masses. They are the architects of the unseen, the ones who give shape to the inner life, who map what others can only sense. They show us what can be dreamed, and therefore, what can become real.
The irony, of course, is that the world we live in—the clothes we wear, the cities we walk through, the media we consume, the very ideas of love, justice, and identity—were all first imagined. They came from artists, designers, poets, visionaries, and misfits. The creatives shape and fashion the world that everyone else passively lives inside. Most never notice. Some even resent and resist it.
And that is where the trouble begins.
Because the power to create carries risk. When art is misunderstood—when its ambiguity is seen as weakness, when its truth is treated as ornamental, when its moral complexity is flattened into propaganda—its transformative power is not lost, but misused and misdirected. The poor bumpkins, the earnest literalists, the profiteers and the populists—they reach into the creative well not to nourish the spirit, but to fuel the machinery. They use the artist’s work to manipulate, distract, sedate, or inflame. They strip it of its nuance and repurpose it as tool or weapon.
So we must remember: creativity is not merely self-expression. It is a form of stewardship. To create is to fashion the very frameworks in which others must live. It is a sacred responsibility. And when that responsibility is misunderstood or hijacked, the world suffers—through ugly design, shallow culture, manipulative storytelling, propaganda, corporate messaging and the loss of awe and wonder.
Fiction, then, is not an escape from reality. It is the antidote to a reality that has forgotten it was once dreamed. All of human life is a dream after all.
And so, in the quiet of our studios and workshops, we write. We paint. We compose. We build. We imagine. We clear our minds and bare our hearts.
Not for profit. Not for applause.
But because we must to remind the world what it is made of or could be.
And to keep shaping it—before it calcifies into someone else's shallow, misleading fiction entirely.
Lots of food for contemplation here in your essay. I like to think I'm inventing or reinventing my creations. I know that no one will make what I make. Perhaps the medium I work in isn't new but as we all perceive the world as WE are and not as it may actually be (Anais Nin said it better: "We don't see things as they are, we see things as WE are") our art is made/seen through always a different lens than anyone else, yet must be done in an innocence and the truth as we know it to be. Thank you for another great essay.