Larry M. Coleman

Don’t see the world as it is. See it as a photograph.

—Henry Carroll, Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs

The greatest pleasure of fiction, both as a writer and a reader, is inhabiting a world that doesn’t exist, but could (or should). You can make your world exactly the one you want to live in: whether that means one better than the real one or much worse, funnier or more serious, beautiful or bleak. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s your world. If it’s interesting enough for you to want to inhabit, you can probably convince some other people to want to visit it for a while, too.

But don’t start with thinking about whether others will like it. Create your world first. Take that mental snapshot you have and make it flesh in words. Don’t worry if that picture you have doesn’t match the real world. Photographs aren’t the real world, either. A good photographer chooses their composition to match their own view of the world. They move around to get it framed exactly how they want to see it.

The advantage of writing instead of photographing is that you can put yourself right where you want to be. You use the same tools of composition, framing, lighting, and so on that a photographer does, but the darkroom is in your mind.

So when you sit down to write, let yourself see the world the way you see the world. Creating a world that reflects you is your privilege, your honor, and your responsibility.

Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be!

—Miguel de Cervantes

Fiction is the purest form of non-fiction. Great fiction lets us see the world for what it really is, and it does it more powerfully than non-fiction. Like humor and satire (going all the way back 2000 years to Petronius’s Satyricon), it lets us say things people wouldn’t listen to any other way. Use that power. Tell your truth. Say what’s there.

Let’s close with another quotation of Henry Carroll’s from the same book:

If you want to take great photographs you need to stop looking and start seeing.

The same advice applies to writing: if you want to write something good, you need to stop looking and start seeing. Don’t see the world just as it is. See it as it really is.