
☞ The Messiness of Reality and Stories

I love speculative fiction like Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin 's, which creates alternative versions of reality based on enormous documentary research and invents the foundations of another present, improbable and credible. I'm also constantly on the lookout for situations where reality is surreal, a kind of "magical realism". As a writer of fi... See more
Anthony Van Den Bossche • «Writing as pollinating», a conversation with Alice Bucknell
With sufficient care, that wheelbarrow full of things could become an entire system of meaning, saying truthful things about our world, some of which might have been impossible to say via a more conventionally realistic approach. That system would mean, not by the plausibility or acuity of its initial premise, but by the way it reacts to that premi
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
What you learn about the world through fairy tales is to accept things that may not make obvious sense. Trust that there is order behind them, and by doing so slow down the entropy of life.
Shane Parrish • The Great Mental Models Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology

