Fiction is often presented as a world apart—imagined, invented, entirely “made up.” But any writer who has sat long enough with a character, or shaped a scene from nothing, knows this isn’t quite true. Fiction, for all its disguises, has a way of giving the writer away.
So the question is worth asking: when we write fiction, are we truly writing stories that are separate from us—or are we, in some way, always writing ourselves?
The Author in the Shadows
Even in the most fantastical narratives—spaceships, talking animals, impossible futures—there’s a fingerprint. A worldview. A wound. A wish.
Writers may claim distance: “This isn’t me.” “This didn’t happen.” “I just made it up.” But fiction has a strange way of pulling from our inner archive. Characters may be imagined, but their reactions are often deeply felt. Settings might be fabricated, but the emotional weather tends to mirror the author’s own climate.
Fiction lets us say things we may not admit in a journal. It gives us plausible deniability while still offering confession.
Disguised Truths
Sometimes, what we invent tells the truth more clearly than what we recall. A story about a girl who disappears into a forest may be less about the forest and more about the author’s relationship with solitude, fear, or the desire to vanish. A dystopian world may simply be an honest account of the author’s worldview, projected outward.
In fiction, metaphors do heavy lifting. We process real pain in abstract ways. The breakup becomes a storm. The childhood trauma, a ghost. The disillusionment with society, a crumbling city.
And because it’s “just a story,” we are more willing to explore it. Readers and writers both.
Fiction as Emotional Autobiography
While the events may be fabricated, the emotions rarely are. Writers bleed onto the page, often unknowingly. A simple line of dialogue may carry a real argument from years ago. A throwaway character might be the composite of two people the author has never forgiven—or never could let go of.
Even when a writer tries to escape themselves in fiction, they often end up revealing more. You can’t invent convincingly without drawing on experience. And even the gaps in understanding—what a writer gets wrong—are revealing in their own way.
Can Fiction Ever Be Objective?
True objectivity in fiction is an illusion. Choices about character, voice, tone, and setting are all filtered through the writer’s lens. Even the decision to write a story at all stems from something personal: a curiosity, a frustration, a longing.
In this sense, fiction is not a departure from the self but an extension of it.
The writer may change names, places, and outcomes. But something of the internal world—the anxieties, beliefs, questions—remains intact, however well hidden.
The Writer Revealed
So what does this mean for readers? Perhaps it means reading fiction not just for story, but for soul. And for writers, it may be a call to honesty—not in facts, but in intention.
Fiction isn’t a mask. It’s a mirror. It just happens to be angled in a way that shows the inside more than the outside.
In writing fiction, we are not escaping ourselves. We are rendering ourselves in code—sometimes cryptic, sometimes clear—but always there, just beneath the surface.
As I reflected in Why I Write, writing is a way to explore what it means to be human. Fiction is simply the imaginative path through that same terrain. The names and places may change, but the search is always the same.
