12. Why You Should Read Fiction
With a brief journey into the evolution and philosophy of language
My story
When I was young, I read fiction all the time. And now I don't. For whatever reason, I fell into the trap of only reading non-fiction as an adult.
Until last week.
For a number of reasons, there was a little emptiness in me, and from that emptiness grew an urge to just buy a novel. Maybe I felt the need to do something screen-free, solitary and enjoyable that I hadn't done in a while, or maybe it was to remind myself about core childhood memories of being enthralled in a good book. And so, on a Sunday night with not many places open, I bought a novel from the supermarket (yes - all the bookstores were shut). I settled on "With a Mind to Kill" by Anthony Horowitz - a James Bond novel - more out of lack of options than literary choice. It was a supermarket, remember, not a library.
The book itself was ok, but more important were the broader reflections it stirred in me. It reminded me the joy of reading fiction again.
But it also did more than that.
It made my ability to read non-fiction and work-related documents much better too.
And that got me thinking about...
How language co-evolved with narrative
Communication is different to language. You can communicate with your face and body, but language is the act of vocalising, or writing or reading. Whilst there are more than a few contending theories about the pre-human evolutionary pressures that brought about our immense linguistic capabilities, narration and storytelling are big contenders in driving the evolution of language.
Why should you care?
Telling stories is learning lessons
Well, it means that the fundamental structure of language is built for narration. Narration is important - telling stories is learning lessons. Fictionalising multiple real-life events into one "fictional" meta-event offers human beings a way to learn from the past, and pass on guidance on how to act. In this way, stories can act like moral zip files. It compresses experience and knowledge into drama.
And we can embody drama deeply.
As creatures, we were social before we were strategic. Dramatisation was a way of embodying knowledge which perhaps could not be articulated or extracted out of the actions of people. We could dramatise the act of a young hunter bravely killing a mammoth to feed the clan. We could embellish the story to include various side quests and explore the hunter’s actions in relation to other tribe members. But that all comes before our ability to extract out the "non-fictional" elements from the story like the importance of bravery, strength or honesty.
Fiction precedes non-fiction. There's a reason why Dostoevsky's fictional works preceded Nietzsches non-fictional corpus.
Why you should read fiction
Fiction is often more "true" than reality. It collates multiple experiences and extracts what's meaningful across each, and dramatises this.
Fiction helps you look for the overarching narrative in anything you subsequently read. It forces you to remember characters, arcs, and history. These skills are important in non-fiction and technical writing too. Keeping the thread of a technical text is harder, and fiction helps you hold it all together.
Fiction is fun.
Language was built for storytelling. There's a reason that the richness of language is showcased in novels and not something dreary like an instruction manual.
All of life is a story - and you are the main character of yours. Fiction helps you see the stories of the world, and perhaps even articulate your own in a meaningful light. So much so, that how you tell the story of your past will change the trajectory of your future.
So, what's your story?
One of the interesting things I discovered having children (mine are 10 and 12 now) is that stories can be incredibly healing in certain ways psychologically. They can somehow transmit important ideas in a way that if you told them directly would be too direct - there's a process in stories where ideas are subtly suggested and you do the last stage of forming those suggestions into actual ideas, and I think the fact that you do that last stage yourself is important.
I suspect as an adult that is still true. I know that I am happier when I have a good fiction book on the go. The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Brooker is a really interesting book about what is going on in stories (but it is thick! though easy to skim parts).
Agree completely with the virtues of reading fiction. I think short fiction, whether a novella or a short story, is underrated. And my best reading experiences have come from re-reading works of fiction.