Fiction

Fiction is something humans have created to represent everything that they do not perceive as "real", yet history is the fiction we write to convince ourselves. Fiction is the first form of complex storytelling, used to generate moral lessons or explain something we could not understand. Fiction has THOUSANDS of sub-genre, each with at least several sub-sub-genre. The vast diversity means that each person is bound to find some they love and some they hate for any of a vast variety of reasons. I like fiction with a good plot and an involving story, if it can make me cry, laugh, smile, and hate; then it is a good story to me. What I have difficulty with are short (really really short) stories, often due to the lack of substance and the sheer majority that speed through the plot.

On that note I am unsure of what i think of Sharon Krinsky's Mystery Stories. Each story is barely a paragraph long but each is said in a way that they are coherent and complete. In the story The Talking Cat it uses small simple sentences yet manages to say exactly what it needs to to progress the story along, it even manages to use a plot devise of mystery as you do not know any of the characters yet when read they seem to be all there. Perhaps I am simply impeded by my dislike of such fiction to make a full analysis and critique but it seems that it is by all definitions still a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Each story in this section of the packet has this astounding ability to instantly generate relate-able characters and tell something to the reader all in a single paragraph. The concise manner of writing is commendable and I can see a bit of myself in each piece, generated on each character by  my own mind from the lack of description by the author. It is much like taking a manikin and making it a person, it is not that it is now a person but rather that we perceive it as such.

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
         -The King; Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland