The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.
Tim O'BrienRead
In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the tendency to address the easier aspects of storytelling rather than confronting the deeper issues of creativity.
Tim O'Brien suggests that in fiction workshops, participants prefer discussing the surface details of realism and believability, as they are more straightforward topics than tackling the complex and often challenging nature of imagination itself. This reflects a broader truth about creative processes, where discussions can often sidestep deeper insights into originality and vision.
Themes
FictionImaginationWorkshopsCreativityRealism
In practice
Example use cases
A teacher may use this quote to encourage students to delve deeper into their creative writing assignments.
More from Tim O'Brien
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Unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not allow a man's failings to disappear beneath a veil of numbers. People talked. Secrets did not stay secret.
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Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.
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War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.
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It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
Tim O'BrienRead
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