Today’s Thorn In My Flesh

     Get a load of this:

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm over escapism as fiction's driving force. It's been something of a stitch in my side for a while now.

I'm not against escapism. It's good to dream. I'm concerned that too much escapism, without the moral compulsion to pioneer what we…

— Daniel P Riley (@Misterdpriley) September 9, 2026

     Bloody hell. Just how far would I have to travel to get away from people who try to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do? Now it’s come to what I read and write. That is the veritable “crossing of the line,” the unforgivable sin.

     People read fiction for a variety of reasons, but paramount among them is the desire to step away from their real lives and cares. In other words, to escape! Escapism is at the root of all consumption of fiction. Stories about the lives and cares of fictional characters provide us with some distance from what bedevils us personally. If that temporary separation from reality brings usable insights, that’s a wonderful bonus, but the great majority of fiction readers don’t insist on that.

     A lot of fiction tells us what we already know to be true. Indeed, the reinforcement of the “eternal verities” is one of fiction’s principal services to us. The truly great storytellers all do so. But telling someone what he already knows doesn’t detract from a story’s value as a personal escape hatch.

     Some of the very worst fiction ever written is anti-escape. Those stories practically demand that the reader suffer. I have a few “classics” in mind, though I shan’t name them here. Well, all right, but just one: A Death in the Family. If you want to put a young person off reading for the rest of his life, insist that he immerse himself in that dreary exercise in grief.

     If there is a maxim every storyteller must follow, it’s this:

Give the reader
Something he cannot get
From “real life.”

     If you can’t – or won’t – do that, you have no business telling stories. No matter how literate you are, how erudite, how eloquent in print or in speech, you will not serve the reader.

     I do it by telling stories about heroes that don’t exist, places the reader can’t visit, and events so improbable that they can only occur in fiction.

     Take it from a grizzled old veteran of the Pixel Wars: that is how to make your readers love and praise you. And who knows? They might even make you wealthy and famous. But they assuredly won’t do any of that if you mire them in troubles much like the ones they read to escape.