PROMPT #445
PROMPT #445
The theme for this week’s creative endeavours is
FICTION
The format need not necessarily be fiction, though there is no bar on using the form. What constitutes fiction in the post-truth era? How thin or distinct are the lines between fact and fiction? Do the disclaimers that all characters are fictional really mean anything?Do you follow a formula when writing fiction, or just let it all flow freely?Feel free to share a piece of speculative, interactive or any other kind of fiction that fascinates you most. Book reviews are also welcome.
Reena’s Xploration Challenge #445
When Fiction Becomes Part of You
When Fiction Becomes Part of You
What constitutes fiction?
Technically, the answer should be simple.
People who never existed.
Places imagined by an author.
Conversations that were never spoken.
Magic that cannot be proven.
Lives created between the covers of a book.
But then there is The Legend of the Ice People.
And suddenly, the answer becomes complicated.
I discovered Margit Sandemo’s world many years ago, and somewhere along the way her characters stopped feeling like characters I merely read about.
I travelled with them.
I feared for them.
I loved some of them.
I probably wanted to shake a few of them. 🤭
Through forty-seven books, generations were born, loved, suffered and died. History mingled with folklore, supernatural forces walked beside ordinary people, and the boundary between darkness and light was rarely as straightforward as it first appeared.
Of course I knew it was fiction.
That never mattered.
Because fiction does something peculiar.
We know the people aren’t real, yet we cry when they die.
We know the world exists on paper, yet we miss it when we close the final book.
We know the author invented the story, yet something within it can reveal a truth about ourselves that reality never managed to explain.
Perhaps that is why I don’t particularly like drawing a hard line between fiction and truth.
Fiction does not have to be factual to tell the truth.
Years later, those books were still living somewhere inside me.
Then something unexpected happened.
I began writing music.
And the world I had once entered as a reader returned through another door.
Characters became melodies.
Legends became lyrics.
The atmosphere of those early books became seventeen songs on my album Beneath The Northern Stars.
I had taken something born in another person’s imagination, filtered its inspiration through decades of my own memories and emotions, and created something new.
That fascinates me.
Where, exactly, did the fiction end?
Perhaps stories never truly finish when we reach the final page.
Some disappear.
Some entertain us for an afternoon.
And some put down roots.
They become part of our imagination, our language, our creativity and even the way we understand ourselves.
Margit Sandemo created a fictional family.
I entered their world as a reader.
Decades later, I walked out carrying music.
Maybe that is the greatest magic fiction performs.
It invents something that never happened —
and leaves behind something absolutely real.
https://theafterlovevoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/my-movie-6.mp4
With love, coffee, poetry, and stardust,
— Maggie The Afterlove Voice 💫
https://ditto.fm/silenced-but-not-broken
🌙 Beneath the Northern Stars – My New Album
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