We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

Orson Scott Card
About This Quote

We all know that life is full of ups and downs, good times and bad. Fiction doesn't help us deal with these unpleasant situations. If we read a novel, we expect to find a happy ending. We find characters who learn from their mistakes and who grow and change through the course of writing the story.

We want to be assured that our own lives will turn out the same way. But we can't know for sure. We can never be an author and write a novel about our lives or give them that kind of closure.

What we can do is use fiction as a way to get an author's perspective. The reader will never get to share in all the emotions of the characters; he or she won't get to experience life the way the characters do; but, by reading about them, we can make sense of our own experiences and find some kind of meaning in them.

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