More Than Just a Good Story

We sometimes talk about reading fiction as though it’s an escape.

And, of course, sometimes it is. There is something to be said for spending a few hours worrying about someone else’s problems instead of your own.

But I think fiction does something more interesting than that.

It gives us a safe place to encounter lives, choices, values, and perspectives other than our own. We can consider things and try on choices without having to adopt them or live with the consequences.

When we read a story, we’re doing so much more than following a plot. For a while, we have to make sense of the world from inside someone else's circumstances. That person may be someone we'd admire if they were real. They might also be despicable. Either way, we know what they know. We see what they notice. We begin to understand why they make the choices they make, or how they came to be who they are.

Sometimes we agree with them.

And, frankly, sometimes we want to reach into the book, grab them by the shoulders, and shout, “What on earth are you doing?!”

Either way, we’re considering a life from a perspective other than our own.

Different kinds of fiction can do that in different ways.

Fantasy can take an ordinary human problem and make it enormous. Questions about power, loyalty, prejudice, courage, or responsibility become harder to ignore when kingdoms are falling and somebody has a dragon.

Romance puts relationships under a microscope. Two people have to figure out trust, communication, vulnerability, conflict, and what they’re willing to risk for another person. The circumstances may be fictional, but the choices usually aren't.

I love historical fiction because it puts me inside another time instead of simply giving me a history lesson. When it’s well researched, we learn history almost incidentally while experiencing how people might have lived within the customs, limitations, assumptions, and events of their time.

One thing that gets me is that even characters I don't particularly like can be interesting, even useful, to get to know. After all, understanding why someone does something isn't the same as agreeing with them. A character can make a terrible choice—even a cruel one—and fiction lets us see how that choice makes sense to them, given who they are and the life they've lived.

But the best part, at least for me as a reader, is that every once in a while, a story sneaks around the front door of something I've always believed but haven't actually thought much about.

We generally don’t pick up a book intending to reconsider what we think about ambition, family, love, responsibility, success, or what makes a good life.

We’re just reading a story.

Then somebody makes a choice.

And we think, Oh. Huh.