Made Up Stuff

Hm, never did edit this yet. Kinda rough but it did come in at just under 500 words.

I believe in fiction.

More specifically, I believe in stories. I believe that stories have a power to teach us without even feeling like learning. When I was younger, I never questioned my ability to learn something from stories my parents told me about their lives. But I didn’t then feel the same way about fiction.

Made-up stories. Entertainment. Diversions. Fiction was something to escape into, I felt, with very little bearing on the real world.

It wasn’t reading any one book that changed my mind about fiction. It wasn’t reading that changed my mind at all. It was when I started to write fiction.

Suddenly I learned something that would seem blindingly obvious but was not, at least to me: Someone had to write these stories, no matter how fantastic. The author writing about monsters had never actually confronted a monster, and so he wasn’t just inventing the monster but also each character’s reaction to it. I started to ask myself then that fundamental writer’s question: Why write that scene this way?

As a writer I was beginning to ask myself the same question. The lessons I was taking away from fiction were not the sort of what, when, why that as a student I was most familiar with. They were lessons about me, the things I believed, the way I would expect people to react, how I think the world works.

I never had much trouble finding something to learn from a book like Dickens’ “Great Expectations.” But to read Dickens for the sake of entertainment and take away no greater learning than some historical facts is a sin indeed, I soon learned. Moreover, it is not just classics or even serious literature where I learn. Those monster stories, I started to notice, were also full of questions: Fight or flight? To trust the unknown or mistrust? And beyond that a good thriller can teach some practical lessons for the real world, too. For example, should a serial killer have you cornered in your home, don’t run upstairs. You’re only making their job easier.

I am more likely to be moved to great extremes of emotion by fiction than by a biography, or any other work of non-fiction. I am more likely to think back on a novel twenty years from now and know I took something from that novel that has mattered to me. Most of what I take from non-fiction reading has little value unless I should be playing Trivial Pursuit.

Humans have told stories throughout all our time. It is one of those things that makes us human. But even a honeybee comes back to the hive and dances to tell the story of where it found the best pollen. It is my imagination that separates me from a honeybee. My imagination that can recognize fiction but also benefit from it, my imagination that can create a convincing and hopefully valuable fiction. My imagination that I cannot fathom ever being without.