I don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.
Ben LernerThe story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.
Ben LernerMy concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.
Ben Lerner