The Power of Fiction

I’ve had a lot of free time lately, and in that time, I’ve done a good bit of reading. When I was little, my reading was 95% fiction – novels of all stripes, from Gary Paulsen and Nancy Drew to Dickens and Shakespeare. I loved them all.

Fiction and Facts

As I got older, time became more limited. My reading shifted from being primarily about pleasure to being about preparation. I remember being in elementary school and tearing through dozens of books in a summer, while my mother didn’t even finish one. I couldn’t understand at the time how this was possible, but I do now. My bookshelves are primarily filled with non-fiction, on topics I think will be useful in the future. I can go months without reading something just for the pleasure of it.

There are just so many things to learn in the world! I’m interested in everything from architecture to astronomy, history to zoology, poetry to number theory. I could live hundreds of years, and I still wouldn’t have time to really explore all the things that interest me. I remember arriving at Harvard, looking at the course offerings, and realizing that if I took the maximum number of classes every semester for four years, I wouldn’t even have taken 1% of the undergraduate courses on offer – and that doesn’t even count the classes that were available at the grad schools, or at MIT across town, or at a dozen other places! In a world where there’s so much to learn, is fiction really worth the time?

Worth the time?

My answer is yes because of another memory at Harvard. It was a rainy, one of those cold, gray evenings where nothing seems very hopeful. Classes hadn’t been easy, and between that, a cappella, and ROTC, I was run-ragged and ready to be done. I had a meeting in half-an-hour, and I didn’t have time to go back to my dorm beforehand. Instead, with nothing better to do, I wandered into a bookstore.

It was the very best sort of bookstore – cozy, cluttered, and full of warmth. It was like finding a magical land – books, books, and more books, stacked up ceiling high in row after narrow row. It was like an oasis of comfort compared to the gloomy twilight outside. I went to that store several more times, and I never left without a book. It was at this point, in the middle of college, that I remembered how to read fiction again – to get lost in a story of someone else, somewhere else, and let the author take you away into their world.

That, I think, is fiction’s most valuable gift to us: it takes us out of ourselves, in a way non-fiction never can. Perhaps it doesn’t give us information in the same way non-fiction does – although I wouldn’t want to short-change the immense amount of general knowledge I got from reading when I was younger – but it gives us something better.

Fiction’s Gifts

Of course, first off, fiction gives us escapism. It allows us to leave our worries and problems behind for awhile and become involved in new problems, which we can then cathartically overcome. But I think being taken out of ourselves teaches us more than that. It teaches us how to dream, how to think in new ways, how to conceive of things we didn’t think possible, reach for things we didn’t think attainable. It makes us ask, “why not?” It makes us think more deeply about our world.

More than that, fiction – really good fiction read by a willing reader – teaches us empathy. It allows us to live other lives, to go through things we’ve never ourselves faced and understand how they might affect us. As I grow in life experience, I find it easier to empathize with book characters, but I think reading can also work in the reverse direction; I think, if we let it, it can teach us how to empathize with other people. It can be a sort of indirect life experience if we take its lessons to heart.

This, I think, is why we also must be careful what we read. This isn’t to say that reading the wrong book will turn you into a super-villain. But just as, over time, how we choose to eat and work out begins to shape our bodies, so does what we choose to learn and think about shape our minds and outlooks. To truly enjoy fiction, we have to let it inside our souls – and that calls for a degree of caution.

But the best sort of fiction can help turn our souls into something beautiful. It can give us courage in dangerous times times, perseverance in difficult times, hope in dark times. It can teach us how to react with grace to hardship and compassion to hate. It can teach us to hope for a better day and work for a better world. In the end, it is fiction that teaches us the most important lessons of all.*

*J.R.R. Tolkien agrees with me in this short paper that has always been one of my favorites. He devoted much of his life to writing fairytales, because he felt that fairytales that allowed us to understand the deepest truths of the world.