[aaronmcs]

I think it is important not to boil fiction down into the 'idea or set of ideas the writing expresses' because if the author could so well articulate their 'idea' then wouldn't they be better off writing an essay rather than a narrative?

Instead, I think the fascination with difficulty is exactly this -- the idea that some ideas are amorphous and difficult to express directly, and that authors have tried (successfully and less so) drastic measures to try and, in their own way, do exactly what you said in your comment.

And there is something, for some, inherently interesting in the different contortions of text that experimental writers have come up with.

[pure-awesome]

> wouldn't they be better off writing an essay rather than a narrative?

There's an interesting quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is best known for writing the fan-fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

"Nonfiction conveys knowledge and fiction conveys experience. If you want to understand a proof of Bayes’s Rule, I can use diagrams. If I want you to feel what it is to use Bayesian reasoning, I have to write a story in which some character is doing that."

https://intelligence.org/2016/03/02/john-horgan-interviews-e...

It's interesting to note that he wrote HPMoR with a specific purpose in mind, namely to teach the specific skills of "rational" thinking he wrote about on the LessWrong site.

In his case it seems he saw fiction as something complementary to his essays, a means of conveying "experience", a simulation of living through situations in which the concepts could be used.

This is, of course, far from the only use of fiction, but I think it at least provides a specific example of a way in which fiction can be used to convey something in a way that cannot be (easily) done using dry prose (even if you are considering it purely from a practical standpoint without any reference to artistic merit).

[tnecniv]

> their 'idea' then wouldn't they be better off writing an essay rather than a narrative?

Not necessarily. It's a lot easier to empathize with characters and a novel can capture something more ephemeral. Camus would write a novel first then turn it into an essay.

[BLKNSLVR]

> if the author could so well articulate their 'idea' then wouldn't they be better off writing an essay rather than a narrative?

I have pages and pages of what I think are well-articulated ideas that would be relatively easy to turn into essays. My challenge is finding a narrative that ties them all (or at least some of them) together.