The Saturday Morning Blogger – Truth vs. Fiction

James Barrington

Tom Clancy has been quoted as saying that fiction is harder to write than non-fiction, because fiction has to be believable. I don’t know about you, but I think he is onto something.

I do believe that well-written fiction can have enough unexpected twists and turns that it makes it almost unbelievable, but in the literary world that tends to push it into fantasy or science fiction.

The 2001-2002 NFL season that began with the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon ended with the New England Patriots turning around a lackluster season with a second-string quarterback and winning their first Super Bowl. If that had been a work of fiction, people would have dismissed it as being trite. Many wartime clichés were born in real life experiences of World War II veterans.

All that is to say, verging on the unbelievable in works of fiction does not automatically make a scene or passage unbelievable or cliché. Often such passages just need some extra work to make them fit into the mold of the believable. I further defend that statement with the evidence of supernatural or miraculous events that we scratch our heads about as we try to make explanations fit into a category with which we are more comfortable.

There are miracles in this world. Sometimes we just need to open our spiritual eyes to see them.