: Re: Should I be concerned with my fiction writing containing accidental prophecies of real world events? I'm writing a book (only a hobby, but I hope I can publish it one day). I've started writing

@Gonzalez219

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The biggest problem I see is that your "prediction" will not be appreciated, and your actual creativity is lost and considered derivative.

Suppose I started writing a book about terrorists, hijacking planes and bringing down the World Trade Center Towers by crashing into them, six months before that actually happened.

Well I'm 3/4 of the way through the first draft of my novel, and suddenly it's crap: Because any publisher reading it, even if they know me, is going to say "When did you start writing this? on 9/12?"

It may not be derivative of reality, but it sure looks like it, and the surprise factor of my ingenuity is is completely evaporated: The suspense of what my terrorists are doing by learning to fly is gone, anybody reading knows exactly what they are going to do. Any suspense about how they plan to escape the crashing plane is gone; anybody reading understands they are suicide bombers.

(I'm just saying this as an example; I did not write any such thing.)

In any case, I'd worry about how the work would be received once the events you invented as your own creative fiction are perceived by others as a simple recital of recent historical events. Will they see enough merit in the rest of the plot to warrant spending money on it? Will they suggest you condense your hundred pages to five, since far less exposition and setup is needed to remind people that X, Y and then Z all happened last year?

So my answer is yes, I would be concerned about whether most of my story just got stomped on by reality.

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