Writing Fiction in an Age of Alternative Facts

One of the reasons people read fiction — and this goes double, it seems to me, for genre fiction — is to escape. It’s to go into another world and forget, if only for a brief period of time, the realities of life we’d prefer avoiding — be it rising political unrest, climate change, a creeping deadline, or even just the dishes in the sink.

I once spent an entire summer in a fictional environment: I was pretty seriously depressed and didn’t want anything to do with my current reality, so I went through — in order — the entire Dick Francis opus. I’d finish one book and immediately pick up the next. Along with time and some therapy, those books, those alternative lives, got me through my problems with my own.

There’s nothing wrong with writing and reading good escapist literature. We need to be entertained, and stories can take us anywhere: they’re the magic carpet of the mind. This is especially true of mystery fiction — it’s not only far from our own lives, but often far from reality as well. Most murders, after all, are not committed in genteel circumstances by Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the knife.

And I wonder, sometimes, if playing the fiction card relieves us — readers and writers alike — from the storyteller’s responsibility, the obligation to observe and reflect a culture, a society, a time. I…