Reflection #2

Writing is such a powerful tool. A tool that is used by many to help them escape what we know as reality. Writers such as Alice Hoffman and Sue Miller used their writing to help them cope with their everyday life problems. In Alice Hoffman essay, “Sustained by Fiction While Facing Life's Facts,” Hoffman explained the pain and sorrow of having told that she had breast cancer. She looked from aid from her family and realized how each of them coped with their diagnosis of breast cancer differently. Hoffman then realizes that her way of coping through her harsh reality of cancer is by writing. She would always write every day because that was her escape. She could control her story and as well as the shape and form of it, unlike her reality. Hoffman concludes her essay by saying that it gave her hope and without it she most likely would have been lost. For Sue Miller in her essay “Virtual Reality: The Perils of Seeking a Novelist's Facts in Her Fiction,” she explains that to truly achieve at being a novelist you cannot have the mindset that to write a successful and entertaining book is by writing life problems that you may have experienced. If that’s the case then everyone can be writers if such a task was so easy to follow. To be a novelist you must be able to, as Miller said “close the events maybe to his or her life, there is some distance, some remove, which allows for the shaping of the work. The shaping, after all, what it’s all about.” How true that statement is indeed because without a powerful, careful, well written story how can you open the doors for your readers to embrace the world you wrote for them. With this said I truly understand the power of fiction and gained more knowledge of what it is to be a true novelist.