The Writing Life Too

"Fiction's stock in trade is subjectivity. And all experience is subjective. In fiction, things happen only to the extent that they affect some character or characters. Subjectivity requires a nervous system and owes its existence to the fact that no two nervous systems respond to stimuli in exactly the same way. To be authentic, experiences need to pass through a kind of filter: They must be sorted and sifted either through the sensibility of a particular character or set of characters, or through the mind-set of an omniscient narrator, or through an impersonal, objective filter that edits out all subjective content (feelings and thoughts), relying on readers to supply the missing subjective element (Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" springs to mind). The filter may enhance or extract, but there must be a filter. Information conveyed to the reader with that filter missing or inconsistent is equivalent to wine served without a glace. Impossible? Precisely."  Peter Selgin