Real and the UNREAL

I happen to be writing a paper write now arguing the Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried carries just as much, in fact more, weight than non-fictional accounts of the Vietnam War because it allows the reader to connect on a more personal level as the writer isn't just saying "This happened, then this happened.." it's much more...story like. And if a writer is good at what he does, then it shouldn't matter whether what he writes is based on his life experiences or not. Having said that, all authors add their personal experiences into their writing and I know that personally from my own fictional writing. It was, in fact, the best piece of advice I ever got from a teacher on the subject of writing: Write about what you know. And from the little I know about Ellison, he does shine through in The Invisible Man: the time era is the same, and therefore more importantly they must have had similar social experiences given the racial climate of that era.

So just because you find the two books on different shelves in Barnes and Noble, it doesn't mean I take either of them more or less seriously (going back to the "Expertise" discussion we had one day...) you take them at face value. At the end of the day, they are both stories to you, unless you are hiding something from us and are either Augustine or Ellison.............

and now I will go back to my essay in which I will in short expand upon my ideas here =]