The following essay was originally written in for my MFA in response to Zadie Smith’s “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” I’ve shared it here because the questions Smith raises about imagination, empathy, and the responsibility of fiction both resonate and shape the way I think about writing.
“It may be that the whole category of what we used to call fiction is becoming lost to us.” – Zadie Smith
In my last term of undergrad, I had to write in a genre outside of my concentration of fiction. I chose nonfiction, writing a personal essay, because it’s long been a desire of mine to write a memoir or collection of essays. One of the essay’s recurring motifs is what I call Mirrorwork: The act of cleaning our mirrors often, and with vigor, in order to know ourselves. My essay was one of many acts of Mirrorwork in my life, and it taught me the extreme importance of writing what is true—that is, after all, the entire point of nonfiction. To not make things up. If we’re making things up, we’re not writing nonfiction at all, but fiction. Yet the mind is a vast machine that processes information both consciously and subconsciously, creating impressions and ideas while determining value and verity about what we experience. In that way, it becomes almost impossible for nonfiction to be entirely true. (This we can know by the idea that history is written by the winners, while the losers are silenced.) Rather, nonfiction is as true as we can make it, without flagrantly creating falsities to prove whatever it is we are writing about.
Fiction, on the other hand, is allowed those flagrant falsities. And by flagrant, I don’t mean morally offensive. I mean a philosophical offensiveness to reality as we know it, to the “truth” of nonfiction. It is these flagrant falsities that give characters the ability to wield the elements or authors to imagine alternative history. The point of fiction is that it is allowed to be untrue to any degree it wishes. Whether the author of fiction writes with integrity when it comes to the subject of not causing harm through caricatures, reinforcing stereotypes, and so on is another subject than what I’m discussing (but one of no less importance). “Fiction… was always interested not only in how things are but also in how things might be otherwise,” Smith tells us. As writers of fiction, we take stock of what we know of the world, what we have seen, and what we do or don’t understand, and go on to write something that may or may not be true. But it has the right to not be true at any given moment, and it is through those flagrant falsities that we can arrive at truth through invention.
She writes, “The old—and never especially helpful adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane.” I understand why. Historically speaking, publishing has privileged some voices while excluding others. Movements like #OwnVoices emerged to address genuine inequities. They’ve also encouraged writers to think more carefully about the lives they portray and the harm that careless representation can cause. But Smith’s essay asks another question: If fiction requires imaginative empathy, how narrowly should we define who is permitted to imagine whom?
When we step into fiction, we are asked to lay down our predispositions so we can step into something that is openly unconcerned with factual reality. When we become afraid to imagine beyond ourselves, imagination and creativity narrow as well. More importantly, so does what I call Windowwork. The opposite of Mirrorwork, Windowwork is the act of cleaning our windows often, and with vigor, in order to imagine what it is like to be others. Smith speaks of the importance of compassion—where Mirrorwork is an act of radical compassion for oneself, Windowwork is an act of radical compassion for others. If we cannot sit in a story of those unlike us, even if we get things completely wrong, we cannot say we have made a valiant effort to understand them. Thus, we have not given our all in developing compassion for anyone but ourselves.
Windowwork, maybe more so than for readers, is a responsibility writers have. There is a fantasy novel I’ve been wanting to write for many years from the POV of someone based in a culture outside my own. I’ve put off writing, not because I believe fiction should be prohibited from crossing such boundaries, but because I haven’t done the necessary Windowwork. The question, for me, is not, “Am I allowed?” Rather, it’s “Have I listened enough?”
Fiction does not require a just world. It often requires the exact opposite. Stories imagine cruelty, prejudice, oppression, abuse, and violence—but not because they’re celebrating those things. Rather, they offer us a place to examine horrors safely. To wrestle with them and, sometimes, imagine something better. If fiction were only allowed to depict the world as we wish it were, written only by writers who match up precisely to everything written, it would lose one of its greatest powers: Helping us understand the world as it is and any number of worlds we might one day have.
Smith seems to fear fiction may become lost to us. I think it becomes lost first in the imagination of writers themselves. We don’t need readers to dictate this loss for us any more than we need the publishing industry to. If, as writers, we write only for the validation of an audience, we have lost the plot. Rejection hurts, but as people of unending imagination and creativity—“equal-opportunity voyeurs,” as Smith called it—to not write flagrant falsities as a way to determine profound truths is death. To be so afraid of rejection that we never try is a betrayal of souls.
✨solembria✨ 
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