Fiction exists because everyone’s life is more boring than they think.

This includes people living “exciting” or “dramatic” or “noteworthy” lives. High level combat experience, world leadership, the scientific invention of technology that goes on to be revolutionary, etc…still are probably worth a 30 minute podcast and not a book.

I’ve never had the experience of picking up an autobiographical (or scrupulously autofictional—specifying “scrupulously” here) work and wishing it had been longer. In fact I’ve never wished it to be longer than about ten pages. Everyone goes on too much. None of it is as compelling as they think.

I’m not talking about something like the best works of Henry Miller. Those are highly-sculpted literary artifacts that include real incidents but warp and distort them into fiction. And almost no one now is writing at anything like that level.

The problem is something like “reverse imposter syndrome”—almost everyone is an imposter, and everyone lies. Unfortunately they rarely lie in interesting ways, or the bare facts they assume will warrant interest rarely do. It’s not that they’re lying, it’s that they’re lying badly.

This is why something like the asinine Reality Hunger by David Shields misses the mark entirely. “Reality” is always downstream from fiction, including the fictions we call government, financial systems, religions, etc. “Everyday life” is mostly fiction, and the attempt to elevate the genuine repetition and drudgery of “real incidents” results only in dull writing.

Oscar Wilde analyzed all this clearly in “The Decay of Lying.”