abstract expressionism

I’m not sure where to begin with Reality Hunger after just reading the first half. I appreciate what Shields is doing with the work so far, but I’m not exactly sure what it means just yet, if that makes sense… at least in terms of all of the points he makes. I had lots of issues understanding what he was getting at in part C (65), where he says: “The lyric essayist seems to enjoy all the liberties of the fiction writer, with none of a fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that none of this ever really happened—which a fiction writer daily wakes to.” ‘Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.’ But… is nonfiction necessary to find reality in something? Maybe I’m just misunderstanding, but I earlier in the book it seems as though he said that every artist tries to find a sense of reality in their work, no matter what medium it might be presented in. I don’t know if by the ‘burden of unreality’ for fiction writers he means the lies that fiction writers create in order to tell our stories, but the more I think about it the more confused I become. Does our ‘burden of unreality’ mean that we have to work that much harder than the nonfiction writer in order to be able to find that sense of reality in our work?

I know that Shields says later in the same paragraph that “the fiction writer labors under a burden to prove, or create, that reality, and can expect mistrust and doubt from the reader at the outset.” I know when we’re starting with a story from scratch we create a world for our readers and we must attempt to make them believe in that reality that we create, but I don’t think that a nonfiction writer’s work should be any closer to reality than the fiction writer’s simply because it is supposedly coming from a ‘factual’ source. There can be just as strong a sense of reality in the fiction writer’s work, can’t there? I think so!