"If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats"
About this Quote
Bach is slipping a small metaphysical grenade into a cozy sentence: reality, he argues, is not guaranteed by flesh. It’s earned through attention. The line works because it flatters a private experience most readers already suspect is true but rarely defend out loud: that some made-up people lodge in our minds with more force than the acquaintances who drift through our days on autopilot.
The intent isn’t to elevate escapism so much as to reframe it as practice. “Practice being fictional” reads like a paradox, but it’s really an instruction to step outside the cramped identity we perform for rent money, family expectations, and social scripts. Fiction becomes a rehearsal space for alternative selves, moral experiments, and emotional truths we can’t safely test in public. If you let yourself inhabit the invented long enough, you learn how much of your “real” life is also constructed - edited, narrated, defensively simplified.
The subtext is gently anti-materialist and quietly anti-cynical. Bach suggests that “people with bodies and heartbeats” can be less real because they can be opaque: guarded, fragmented, unreadable even to themselves. A fictional character, by contrast, is distilled. The author (and the reader) strips away noise until motive and desire are legible. That legibility feels like authenticity.
Context matters: Bach comes out of a 20th-century strain of American spiritual individualism (think Jonathan Livingston Seagull) that treats imagination as a vehicle for liberation. This line is a manifesto for that worldview: the imagined isn’t the opposite of the real; it’s one of the ways we finally recognize it.
The intent isn’t to elevate escapism so much as to reframe it as practice. “Practice being fictional” reads like a paradox, but it’s really an instruction to step outside the cramped identity we perform for rent money, family expectations, and social scripts. Fiction becomes a rehearsal space for alternative selves, moral experiments, and emotional truths we can’t safely test in public. If you let yourself inhabit the invented long enough, you learn how much of your “real” life is also constructed - edited, narrated, defensively simplified.
The subtext is gently anti-materialist and quietly anti-cynical. Bach suggests that “people with bodies and heartbeats” can be less real because they can be opaque: guarded, fragmented, unreadable even to themselves. A fictional character, by contrast, is distilled. The author (and the reader) strips away noise until motive and desire are legible. That legibility feels like authenticity.
Context matters: Bach comes out of a 20th-century strain of American spiritual individualism (think Jonathan Livingston Seagull) that treats imagination as a vehicle for liberation. This line is a manifesto for that worldview: the imagined isn’t the opposite of the real; it’s one of the ways we finally recognize it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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