I like how Llosa instructs us about an immovable fact,
that a story is only as good as the way that that story is told.
That's the story's power of persuasion.
You may have a great idea for a story, you may have the world's most riveting plot,
but the way you actually deliver it, the words, characters, events and
settings that you choose may end up making that story lifeless or
flat or cliched, despite your magnificent concept.
In this specialization, the foundations of storytelling, each of us,
your instructors Amy, Brando, Salvatore, and myself will be addressing a component
of how to tell your story in a persuasive and powerful manner.
Let's get back to Llosa.
In its persuasive efforts, the novel aims to reduce the distance
that separates fiction from reality, and once that boundary is elided,
to make the reader live the lie of fiction as if it were the most eternal truth,
its illusions the most consistent and convincing depictions of reality.
That's the trick great novels play: they convince us that the world
is the way they describe it, as if fiction were not what it is,
the picture of a world dismantled and rebuilt.
Llosa says we writers want to reduce and even remove or
rely the distance that separates fiction from reality.
We want readers to suspend disbelief,
because somehow in the state of suspension and disbelief,
what is written in a story feels as if it were the most eternal truth.
Isn't it crazy that fiction can sometimes feel more true than something true,
or for that matter, real life?