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We’re Not Building Potemkin Villages
Published Dec 20, 2022
Updated Dec 20, 2022
Culture
9 min
Culture
Published Dec 20, 2022
Updated Dec 20, 2022
9 min
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We’re Not Building Potemkin Villages
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Workshop Diary 3
Translator: Austin Wagner
In the foreword to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, she writes that everything in the novel had, somewhere and sometime in the course of history, already happened, nothing was merely a product of her imagination. She decided to say this because she didn’t want to be accused of sensationalism, of trying too hard, or of exaggerated brutality. Gilead and the handmaids are obviously fictional (let’s hope they stay that way), but when creating a fictional time and place, an author always has decisions to make: how will I make this fictional world realistic for the reader? Or at the very least, believable? Because the goal is to create a system which feels real as you’re reading it: otherwise we’re just writing morality tales or
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