"I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them"

Carlos Fuentes stakes a claim for literature as discovery rather than testimony. Facts may launch the voyage, but they cannot be its destination; a good book converts raw experience into an unknown terrain where understanding is earned, not inherited. The writer’s task is not to inventory what happened but to transform life through shape, voice, and imagination so that something irreducibly new appears, an emotional or moral truth that cannot be paraphrased as data.

Factual experience is reliable the way a map is reliable, which is to say limited by its outlines. Art begins when the writer departs from the map, risking confusion, contradiction, and surprise. That risk is the engine of invention. If the writer already knows everything, plot, argument, meaning, the work hardens into demonstration, a project for proving a point rather than discovering one. Then the book becomes a report, a sermon, a souvenir of experience, not an experience in itself.

Calling “bad books” those written from prior certainty is an attack on complacency. Certainty produces prose that arranges facts to confirm the writer’s identity or thesis. Good books are written against the writer’s intuitions as often as with them; they involve a willingness to be altered by the act of writing. The writer becomes the first reader, surprised, unsettled, sometimes wrong, revising both sentences and self.

Imagination does not negate fact; it pressures it. Research and lived experience supply texture and plausibility, but the alchemy happens when language reorders those materials into patterns of irony, ambivalence, and hesitation, qualities factual testimony cannot contain. The result is a space where readers confront ambiguities that no anecdote can resolve.

Fuentes is defending the novel as a laboratory for possibility. Only when a book ventures beyond what its author already knows can it offer readers more than information: it offers a changed consciousness, the sense that reality has been re-seen, and that we, too, might live differently inside it.