Noun

Singular fiction

Plural fictions

fiction (plural fictions)

1. Literary type using invented or imaginative writing, instead of real facts, usually written as prose.

   The company’s accounts contained a number of blatant fictions.

   I am a great reader of fiction.

2. (uncountable) Invention.

   The butler’s account of the crime was pure fiction.

Synonyms

• fabrication
• figment

Antonyms

• fact

Derived terms

• non-fiction
• science fiction
• speculative fiction
• fiction section

Related terms

• fictitious
• fictional

Fiction (Latin: fictum, "created") is any form of narrative which deals, in part or in whole, with events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary and invented by its author(s). Although fiction often describes a major branch of literary work, it is also applied to theatrical, cinematic, documental, and musical work. In contrast to this is non-fiction, which deals exclusively in factual events (e.g.: biographies, histories). Semi-fiction is fiction implementing a great deal of non-fiction, e.g. a fictional description based on a true story.

Quotes about fiction, the type of literature using invented or imaginative writing instead of real facts.

Sourced

• Fiction is fact distilled into truth.
  • Edward Albee, The New York Times (18 September 1966)

• We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.
  • J. G. Ballard, "Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973), reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)

• Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we [Europeans] shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future. The American way of life is spontaneously fictional, since it is a transcending of the imaginary in reality.
  • Jean Baudrillard, "Utopia Achieved" in America (1986), trans. Chris Turner, (1988) , ISBN 0860919781, p. 95

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Tue Jun 22 01:36:07 2010