"Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places"
About this Quote
Intimacy is a striking word for a soldier to hang on fiction. It suggests not escape but proximity: the reader brought close enough to feel heat off a scene, to register the grain of a room, to know a person past their resume. Morgan’s line shrinks the grand claims people make for novels - morality, truth, society - into a single practical demand: make me care, specifically, about someone somewhere doing something.
The craft lesson is blunt. Plot is not the point; access is. “Characters, events, places” reads like a battlefield triad: who’s there, what happened, where you are. But instead of strategy, Morgan is talking about attention. Fiction works when it converts the abstract into the sensory and particular, when “war” becomes a friend’s trembling hands, a street corner at dusk, a decision made too late.
The subtext carries a veteran’s skepticism toward lofty narratives. Soldiers are surrounded by official stories - heroism, sacrifice, victory - that often flatten lived experience. Intimacy pushes back against propaganda and platitude. It’s a demand for texture and contradiction, for the small private truths that big public language can’t hold.
Context matters, too: a man shaped by 20th-century conflict watching modern life accelerate and anonymize. His definition of fiction is almost an ethical stance. Get close, don’t generalize. Let places have weather. Let events leave marks. Let characters be more than symbols. That’s how invented stories earn the right to feel real.
The craft lesson is blunt. Plot is not the point; access is. “Characters, events, places” reads like a battlefield triad: who’s there, what happened, where you are. But instead of strategy, Morgan is talking about attention. Fiction works when it converts the abstract into the sensory and particular, when “war” becomes a friend’s trembling hands, a street corner at dusk, a decision made too late.
The subtext carries a veteran’s skepticism toward lofty narratives. Soldiers are surrounded by official stories - heroism, sacrifice, victory - that often flatten lived experience. Intimacy pushes back against propaganda and platitude. It’s a demand for texture and contradiction, for the small private truths that big public language can’t hold.
Context matters, too: a man shaped by 20th-century conflict watching modern life accelerate and anonymize. His definition of fiction is almost an ethical stance. Get close, don’t generalize. Let places have weather. Let events leave marks. Let characters be more than symbols. That’s how invented stories earn the right to feel real.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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