As I mentioned before, I have a few phrases of advice regarding creative writing that I repeat often enough to dub them maxims. This time, I want to look at the concept that real life has an advantage over fiction: fiction has to make sense.
This is hardly an original observation of mine, of course; Mark Twain wrote the first known version of this line (“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t”), though I’m rather more fond of G. K. Chesterton’s version (“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction […] For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it”).
The principle here is that reality can be random, but fiction has to have structure. We strive to make fiction as realistic as we can, but the human mind tends to rebel at a story with too much chaos. Perhaps it’s as simple as a recognition that if humans build something, it should be built with purpose and design, and so something that feels too realistic in this way feels as though the writer was careless.
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Novel Ninja 
Writing Maxim #1: Writing is an Art, Not a Science
Over the years, I’ve found myself repeating a few phrases over and over to authors of all levels, including clients, students, and lecture attendees. I eventually started calling them my maxims, and it’s high time I laid them out on my own site. After all, much of the reason for my blog updates is to give me a handy place to put stuff I already repeat a lot, so I can just link people to the post and save time in the future.
Today, it’s Writing is an art, not a science. Kind of obvious, since we call it a creative art rather than a scientific field, but it’s good to really think about what that means — especially authors worried about learning how to “do it right” or violating some kind of rule.
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