Why Read Fiction?

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life. ~Barbara Kingsolver

A few years ago I did an interview with a writer who said very emphatically that he never read fiction. He didn’t like fiction. True stories were all that he ever read or wanted to read. He obviously thought fiction a waste of time and of course, writing fiction a waste of everyone’s time, the writer and the reader.  So, since he knew I wrote fiction and hadn’t seemed to mind letting me know he thought it was an unnecessary vice, he asked me why anyone would want to read fiction. What purpose could there be for reading made up stuff?

I’m not much for controversy. You have your opinion. I have mine and sometimes never the twain will meet. At least that seemed true of this other writer who wanted to share the facts and only the facts. But since he asked, I had to answer. I told him reading fiction can be entertainment. Reading is fun, and being caught up in a story is great. I tried to explain that fiction can be truer than non-fiction in the way it touches a reader.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. ~Jessamyn West

Fiction writers know that they have to make the stories they write more believable than nonfiction. A reader wants to live the story with the characters and to do that, he or she needs to believe it is or could be true. That might make you smile when you think of some of the amazing things you may have read in stories, especially if you read fantasy. Consider Harry Potter riding that broom playing Quidditch. Even though readers knew that was impossible, somehow they still believed because J.K. Rowling’s storytelling skills made it believable. You were on that broom with Harry or maybe down in the crowd cheering him on.

You can be the characters in a fiction book in a way that you can’t in a nonfiction book about a real person. That person has already lived his story and you’re just along for the ride in the backseat watching the real events happen. But a fiction story is different. When you open up that novel, you jump right inside those characters and experience everything with them. You’re not just riding along. You’re right there at the wheel with the characters.

Recent studies have shown many benefits of reading fiction. Here are a few. Reading develops empathy. It relieves stress something like meditation can. It makes us smarter and better problem solvers. It can help us avoid dementia. It might add extra years to our lives. But in my opinion, the very best benefit to reading fiction is that it makes us happier.

What would you have told Mr. NonfictionWriter and reader only? Why do you read fiction? 

Here are a couple of quotes from John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations that give a viewpoint on fiction that I can go along with.

The first is by William Makepeace Thackeray from The English Humorists (1853).

“Fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution than the volume which purports to be all true.”

The second is Ernest Hemingway quoted in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist by Carlos Baker.

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

That’s what I aspire to–writing books that let my readers own it in their hearts.

Have a great rest of the week.