Jane Rule opens the filmFiction and Other Truths (FOT) with a statement that captures one of her central concerns: “The literature I create, I hope, is a literature of a whole world and of a real world. I am a realist.” Rule says she decided to be a writer “because I wanted to speak the truth as I saw it. … No political or moral ideal can supersede my commitment to portray people as they really are” (A Hot-Eyed Moderate, 43). In Rule's aesthetics, “real” is not a naïve concept. First of all, Rule's interest is in telling a truth she did not find in the literature of “the great liars” (FOT) she studied at college. While regarding sexuality as an integral part of the human experience and not as the single feature defining a person, she bemoans the lack of representations of men and women loving someone of their own sex. Rule describes the realities she lives in as a “very mixed world, a world of old and young people, of heterosexuals and homosexuals” (FOT). She portrays a wide range of people and voices, whom she may not always admire or love but always accepts for themselves, and a variety of social, political, and moral positions which she may or may not share but which are all part of the world she lives in.

Clearly, being a realist for Rule is not an affirmation of an existing consensus — unless readers share an understanding of what is “real.” More likely, since particular perspectives from different points of view exist, realism invites a negotiation of conflicting concepts of reality (Fluck 1992, 27). Rule is very much aware that there are various other ways of seeing the world, or other “truths” about reality. To her, it is important to offer her own truth as an active involvement with power structures and to negotiate between her version of the world and the versions of others. Rule writes: