Doris Lessing on writing self-fiction

“Once, all our storytelling was imaginative, was myth and legend and parable and fable, for that is how we told stories to and about each other. But that capacity has atrophied under the pressure from the realistic novel, at least to the extent that all the imaginative or fanciful aspects of storytelling have been shuffled off into their definite categories. There are magical realism, space fiction, science fiction, fantasy, folklore, fairy stories, horror stories, for we have compartmentalized literature as we do everything. On one side realism—the truth. On another, in another box, imagination—fantasy…. When in the realistic novel that other dimension forces its way in, because it has to come in somewhere, then often it is admitted in the shape of madness.” —Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade

Lessing continues talking about writing faction (a word bending of “fact” & “fiction”):

Nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one’s own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions -and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas- can’t be yours alone. The way to deal with the problem of “subjectivity”, that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, transforming a private experience into something much larger. —Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade

These quotes were extracted from http://www.atlantisjournal.org/old/Papers/v22%20n1/v22%20n1-6.pdf