The Deceiver that Undeceives

Why You Should Give Fiction Another Try

Non-fiction helps us pick up skills, introduces new processes to us, and learn about stories that make our lives more bearable. Comparatively, fiction, its happy-go-lucky companion, doesn’t seem as fun to spend time with.

Why would we want to learn about the stuff that exists in imaginary universes? Fiction can seem like entertainment. Escapist alternatives to the valuable lessons in history, biographies, and business books. So with our finite amounts of time, the most effective thing to do would be to choose advice and information that applies into the real world, right?

I’m a hardcore non-fiction reader. The only Haruki Murakami work I’ve read was his memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The only Stephen King work I have read was his autobiography, On Writing. And truthfully, I only read them because I wanted to understand the author’s creative processes and their stumbling blocks as I attempt to perfect my craft.

My exploration into fiction began when I realized fiction writers are generally that much better at writing. They spend their lives on it. And they have to be, because they can’t offer a tangible bag of lessons that non-fiction authors can entice readers with.

But it’s deeper than that.

I think there are a variety of reasons why anyone that does anything related to creative work (e.g., entrepreneurs, designers, writers, marketers, artists, etc.) should read fiction. Firstly, it exercises the imagination. That seems like a peripheral concern, but has practical implications. China recently learned this the hard way. As Neil Gaiman wrote for The Guardian:

The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

More on the conference here. China adopted science fiction because it made a major difference in innovation and invention on a macroscopic level. As Google Creative Labs’ Robert Wong highlights:

• Martin Cooper invented the first cell phone because of what he saw on Star Trek.
• Raytheon developed a user interface for the U.S. military based on one seen in Minority Report.
• SpaceX’s 3D design solution was inspired by the Iron Man movie.

On a personal level, Gaiman also mentions that fiction makes us more empathetic as a byproduct of using our imaginations:

The second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes.

A study published in Science Magazine came to the same conclusion as Gaiman did: respondents who were exposed to fiction were consistently able to more accurately identify emotions in others than respondents who weren’t.

“Even though fiction is fabricated, it can communicate truths about human psychology and relationships,” said Dr. Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University, in an article on Psych Central.

(I imagine I don’t have to explain why empathy is both important and practical.)

Recently, I had a chance to chat with The Remix Project’s Gavin Sheppard. His thoughts on community were fascinating, but one particular point he mentioned on writing really challenged me. Sheppard said:

Sometimes people are even more honest in fiction, because we have a veil between us, and we can say what we want to say. It allows us to examine what could be in exciting ways.

In other words, with non-fiction, writers and authors have to beware of their reputation and those of their interviewees. Fiction writers worry about no such thing. After all, it originates in the imagination. They can make their characters express what they want to express, with any amount of subtlety or aggression. They can twist the plot to spark thoughts that we never would have synthesized on our own.

Or, they can show us the ugliest truths without harming, confronting, or insulting anyone directly. As author Junot Díaz said in an interview with Salon:

I love the Onion. Seamus Heaney just died, and one of the great obituaries of him was a wonderful quote he had about being on the side of undeceiving. And I always thought that something like the Onion is the deceiver that undeceives, which is what fiction at its best attempts to do.

It can be more than escapism.

Fiction helps us exercise our minds and imaginations, parts of us that have decayed since our childhoods. Parts of us that some of us believe we don’t even have anymore, or skeptically dismiss as useless and childish. The same parts that we grudgingly admire when we see an unusual, new solution, an intriguing design, or a challenging piece of art.

And in many cases, fiction reveals truths to us that the real world tries to trick us out of (or into) believing.

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Herbert Lui is an editor at Lantern and regularly writes for The Next Web and The Huffington Post. His work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Fast Company, and Lifehacker.

Cover image by: aidanmorgan