Fiction

Yes, what is it? Fiction is something imagined and is not true in the normal usage of the word true.

Think of Wittgentein’s argument that a private language is impossible. Any use of language must have an objective public component.

Think of Pegasus or a unicorn. If you dissect them appropriately, you will obtain Pegasus parts or unicorn parts that bear some verisimilitude to the parts of a real animal. However, Pegasus and the unicorn are not real.

Fiction is the same way. When a person writes a work of fiction, no matter how paltry their imagination, they have stitched together certain emotions and experiences into a new kind of beast.

The reader of a fiction, which is freely admitted and acknowledged to be a fiction by the writer, should not ask of the writer to tell a scientific or historical truth.

The reader can dissect the fiction into parts and find something real even if it is only a vividly felt emotion, but the whole of the fiction is not true in the conventional sense of true.

That is no more the fault of the writer than it is the fault of Pegasus or the unicorn that they just happen to be the beasts they are.