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.
Conversation
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.
Replying to
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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