Fiction as the last safety net after catastrophic system failure

[rinue]

Sometimes I wonder whether fiction is worth it. I don't mean I question the worth of fiction; that's not in doubt. I mean I question the value of devoting my life to it. For instance, a good winter coat is potentially lifesaving, but I haven't decided to spend my meager free time making winter coats. But recently Ciro has talked about how much a taped-off-TV VHS of minor Disney film Pete's Dragon meant to him as a latchkey kid, and it's terribly sad to imagine it not being made.

Comments

[rinue]

Well, that's part of it. But the other part is that: I think you know already that I'm not one of those people who knew from a very young age that what I wanted was to be a writer/artist and that it was my great talent. I could just as easily have gone into chemistry or law or medicine or aeronautics or music or any number of other things. So sometimes it seems a bit absurd to me that I'll spend an hour working on a light-hearted story about people that don't exist who live in a world that doesn't exist, which is uncertain of publication, and it seems almost immoral to do that instead of, for instance, captioning news bulletins so that deaf people aren't in danger from tornadoes, and also less entertaining than just playing the video game I want to play. I mean, as much as I like fiction, there's a lot of good stuff already out there. Why not just reread some of that stuff? But you never know what's going to mean everything to somebody. Or at least I never do.