The idea of “not breaking character” only makes sense if your character is firewalled off from a “real” you. That’s like VR. When you play with classification ambiguity where many pieces of world-building are hard to classify as fiction or non-fiction, you get AR like fiction.
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I trace the origins of such blended-reality fiction to Lewis Carrol’s Sylivie and Bruno. Alice in Wonderland is VR. Sylvie and Bruno is AR.
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It’s not quite the same as magic realism, but I can’t quite put my finger on the difference. I’m experimenting with elements of both magic realism and blended reality in
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It’s hard because reality is much slower than fiction. I can imagine 10 consulting gigs in a day. It takes about a year to accumulate a “real” data point about the consulting life working with an actual client. So the fiction can easily outrun the nonfiction.
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Trick, I’m finding, is to use the fiction to explore the adjacent possible space around the real. For example, if I observe a real marketing strategy meeting, I can make up absurdist fiction around that realistic core that get at validated and interesting business insights.
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