Originally published in The Writing Cooperative
How fiction shapes reality for both writer and reader
If you tell some people you’re a fiction writer, they think you live in the land of make believe. You’re a dreamer, an entertainer at best. Yes, we fiction writers like to dream, both while we’re awake and asleep. Sure, we like to indulge in our fantasies. And of course, we like to escape. However, fiction has a much greater role that many don’t fully realize.
Fiction teaches us
Storytelling is humanity’s way of learning, or recording history, of remembering the great ones. It is our way to warn, to educate, and to inspire. We pass on our wisdom to the next iteration of humanity, so instead of everyone having to learn all life lessons from scratch, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
The Hero’s Journey, the 5 Acts, the Epic Quest — you see it in everything we do—in marketing, in conversation, in our entertainment. As an outside entity looking in, you would think we are obsessed with ourselves. We tell ourselves stories about ourselves over and over again. But we are just trying to figure it all out. We are trying to get it right.
As we move forward, evolving as a society, as a species, and as individuals, story shapes us. Fiction is the vehicle. Reality is too close to our noses to see. Story is easy to understand and an engaging way to learn. This is why the wise men of ancient times spoke in parables. Myths, fables, fairy tales. Which is more effective? Telling a kid not to lie, or reading him the story of a boy who cried wolf?
Think about the books that most impacted your life. Were they non-fiction or fiction? I bet the first story that swept you away when you were a child was a fairy tale or an adventure. You aspired to the qualities of your hero or heroine. Later you might find other literary heroes to follow, ones who answer the questions that no one in your circle has the answers to. These writers become just as much a part of who we are as our parents, friends, and siblings. They help raise us, in a way.
Fiction tells us who we are
I remember the first time I read Dostoevsky. I was maybe twenty, and I had never read anything like it before. An angsty and lost person, I couldn’t put my finger on why I was so frustrated with the way the world worked. He addressed my feelings with story, excavating lurking notions I never knew I had until his words crystalized them for me. It was indirect, not accusing. I could absorb the ideas, any resistance or denial diluted by the narrative. As he put a name to this unease, it comforted me. I was okay. I was not the only one, even more than a hundred and fifty years later. Not wrong. Not crazy. Maybe I could pick up the baton and take his line of thinking further.
We can be a mystery unto ourselves until we find the right story to tell us who we are, how we feel, and why. The right book is like looking in the mirror. This can be unpleasant, curious, frightening, or exhilarating. It can be life changing.
Books are spooky in this way. They defy the laws of time and space. You can connect with an author’s mind from hundreds or thousands of years ago. You can read the stories of someone on the other side of the world. A tale can be transmitted through air in waves of sound as we read to one another, a message that encompasses the senses, emotions, space, and time, communicated by the vibrations in the throats of our fragile, degenerating bodies. Fiction allows you to transplant yourself into someone else. As the writer, it’s like taking possession of a body. As the reader, you are taking another’s thoughts inside your head. It is a frightening intimacy that leaves you vulnerable and changed. It is a conduit of empathy. It is telepathy.
Fiction heals us
The best part about fiction is its healing power for both the writer and the reader. Humans have the natural compulsion to express themselves, in much the way a dog barks and a bird sings. We must have an output for all we uptake from our experience in this puzzling world. When we are hurt, or are in pain, we cry out in the form of story, saying, this is what’s happening to me. Knowing that someone is listening relieves the burden. It absorbs the blow.
Sometimes this story is about reaching the point where we’re able to resolve our challenges and move on. And this shows the listener not only that the sun also rises, but it can even show them the way out of hell. That is why support groups are so effective in healing. Whether it’s grief, a terminal illness, or an addiction. Giving of our feelings is as cathartic as listening. And that is why fiction has a tandem benefit for both writer and reader.
Emotions are invisible. Scientists are still trying to find where the brain generates them. They are non-existent to the objective world and can only be experienced within the receptacle of a body. They, for all purposes, do not exist, and yet are powerful enough to cause unbearable pain, so much so that these currents of feeling, thoughts and emotion can literally break the mind.
That is the power of the stories we tell ourselves. Often untrue. That the world is a hopeless place, that we are worthless, beyond saving, that we just can’t take it anymore.
Fiction connects us
The right book at the right time is like a loving hand reaching out to someone born deaf, mute, and blind — a connection thought impossible, a benevolent disturbance of the void. We can’t know where we are in the great scheme of things unless we have reference points. Fiction helps us put ourselves in context within the world and other souls.
Fiction is one of the few effective ways to examine and convey the complexity of human experience. Sometimes it takes an entire novel to communicate one kind of grief. The word ‘sad’ is grossly inadequate. There is the sadness when your grandparent dies at a ripe old age after a fulfilling, happy life, but there is an altogether different kind sadness when you lose a close friend from youth, where there was a betrayal, an estrangement. You think of the memories that will never be created. All the things left unsaid.
A piece of music or a painting can communicate the vast landscape of emotion more efficiently than a story. With one look or one listen, a universe of emotion is conveyed. We fiction writers must work harder, must plot our every detail, we must make a world where there was none before.
But in any form of art, it is a combined effort of the creator and the observer. If God is playing a song (“god” meaning the fundamental creative force of The Universe) we are his notes. If he is painting, we are his brushstrokes. If we are living out his book, we are his characters, and we often turn back and look at him and ask why.
Fiction challenges us
When we create, when we write, we are our god selves. And perhaps our creations turn up and look at us. And like the many interpretations of god or the unknowable, religions and theories, our readers will take what they need from us (or choose to close the book and throw it across the room).
In some Eastern spiritual traditions, we were, or are, part of one consciousness that split apart to learn the world again through many different eyes, to have the pleasure of seeking new experiences, to live the joy of reunion, and to find our way to absolute truth of being. Likewise, we are the stories we are told, the stories we have experienced, and the stories we tell ourselves about our identities. We may never comprehend the totality of our existence here, but at least we don’t have to go on this journey alone.
And who says we won’t be able to figure it all out? A hundred years, ten years, a month from now, tomorrow, we may know the unknowable if we keep writing our way to the truth. As much of a fluke it is that we exist means it’s just as likely we stumble upon the answer to everything — if we keep writing, ruminating, waiting for the epiphany of all epiphanies.
This is the greatest quest we can know.
Fiction changes us
So, I urge you, writers and readers, to not just find what interests you and go until the trail ends. Don’t stop, keep going and cut out an alternative path of thinking beyond what is known. Our future is fiction to us right now, but we can decide who we want to be at the end of our tale. We must not hold back. We must not shrink from fear. We must stay curious and bold.
Memories get washed out as we grow. They warp and twist as our perception changes. Dreams evaporate with the rise of the sun. Our flesh will rot, but if we put these emotions, memories, and dreams into words, the story will remain.
Experiment. Test yourself and everything you believe. All that we surely leave behind is our story. And when we drop this body, if having made no other contribution, we can step away from it and be able to say we left a damn good one.
The best fiction is written with humility, bravery, heart, and passion. It helps us understand our failures, regrets, shadows, and secrets. It honors our triumphs over evil and especially the battles against ourselves. Fiction is a way to heal the past. To forgive, and to make room for a new future overflowing with possibility.
Our existence can be thought of as dark, in that we don’t know what is taking place in this incomprehensibly immense universe. It is also baffling that we’re born, without asking, into this world, to bumble around and try to understand what is going on. But whether you find it bleak or absurd, it is beautiful. There is love, and there is friendship, and there is story to carry us through. We pass it along as we each take our turns embodying consciousness, from first the heartbeat to the last.
