On The Erred Power Of Fiction

Is it a curse to be blessed with the power of making things exist? Or a cure?

As the World Book Day is approaching, I’ve been giving a good amount of thought to how fiction affects us. For those of you who do not know, the World Book Day is on 23^rd of April.

Fiction is defined as prose that describes imaginary events and people. We can also say that it is something that is invented or untrue.

In other words, it is not real.

Do you believe that? 

I don’t.

Fiction is realer to me than reality itself.

People often consider fiction as an escape from reality. They forget it could be more than just an escape.

I’ll tell you what fiction means to me. The stories we hear, see, read, they all manipulate our reality like a tale of its own. They change the way we see things. They bend our beliefs. And specifically for prose, open our mind to the endless possibilities. (I didn’t mention movies even though they’re fictional because in case of movies our vision stays limited to what we can see while in prose, our mind gets an opportunity to imagine.)

It makes you feel things without them happening to you.

I’d also written a poem to acknowledge the erred power of fiction (prose to be specific.)

It’s titled: MY LITERARY REFUGE

Here it goes:

Books gave me everything,

While probably I was nothing.

I found, in books, my little infinity,

I wish I'd known it before, its such a pity.

With each book, I grew up a bit,

And began understanding a little more than I did.

To know it all, I had been so keen,

As each book revealed scars unseen.

I wonder if I'm ever forbidden to read,

Because to me, books are like water to the seed.

In the fertile soil, which I'd say is the time span,

I try to read as much as I can.

Books, my life is unimaginable without you,

You swept me off my feet and took me to the yet unexplored you.

With every page came another unexpected event,

Which, earlier, wasn't that frequent.

Writers are capable of expressing a million things,

I wonder what people think before reading, what new adventure each book brings.

To all the writers who changed my world,

I had to read past my bedtime as your story unfurled.

You are never alone in a library,

You are surrounded by a million people, on the contrary.

For me, nothing can ever be the same again,

As I got to know about other people's pain.

Pages fade away with time, so do memories

But that's not the case with extraordinary stories

Books never leave you, they are forever,

And I'm never going to stop reading, I repeat, NEVER.

A little exaggerated, I know. But that’s the way it was.

When you enter a fictional world, you live in fiction while somewhere in the back of your mind reality closes itself like a boring book and returns to its rightful shelf.

After all this, I’d like to ask, if fiction opens our mind to possibilities, isn’t it a cure? It emphasizes on the fact that just the very belief of something’s existence can change the course of the future by giving you the ability to do so.

Too much responsibility isn’t it?

At the end, I’ll conclude with what I believe is the correct way of putting forward what I meant to express by this post: Fiction can never blinden us with the view of a non-existent world. All it does is awaken the vision which calls for such a world to exist in reality.

Its power has been erred.