Several years ago, I did an interview with a writer who said he never reads fiction. He didn’t like fiction. He wanted to read true stories and obviously thought fiction a waste of time. I have to admit, when I’m reading this I wrote about that interview some time ago, I’m wondering why in the world he would be interviewing me or I would be interviewing him. I really don’t remember, but we obviously had different ideas about what we liked to read. At least I do also read nonfiction although fiction has always been my favorite reads.
Anyway, he asked me why anyone would want to read fiction. What is the purpose of reading made up stuff? I had ready answers. Entertainment, of course, was one answer. I told him reading is fun, and being caught up in a story is great. I tried to convince him that fiction could sometimes be truer than nonfiction in how it could touch a reader.
You, as the reader, can be the characters in a fiction book in a way that you can’t in a book about a real person. That person has already lived his story and you’re just along for the ride in the back seat watching the real events happen. But a fiction story – that’s different. You can jump right inside that character and live the story along with him or her. You’re not just riding along. You are experiencing the character’s every action and feeling.
That’s how it is when I’m writing a story too. For sure, when I was creating the characters for my book, the Song of Sourwood Mountain, I was living the story with them. I especially enjoyed sharing the story when I let Ada June, my ten year old character, be the one we were living the story through. Here’s a quote from a scene late in the book where Ada June is having to trust a boy she’s not ready to trust to save her from falling down a cliff.
I hope if you read the story, you will feel as though you are right there with Ada June trying to get a foothold in the side of the steep hill to keep from being that heap of broekn bones at the bottom.
Here are a couple of quotes I found in John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations that give a viewpoint on fiction that I can go along with.
The first is by William Makepeace Thackeray from The English Humorists (1853). “Fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution than the volume which purports to be all true.”
The second is Ernest Hemingway quoted in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist by Carlos Baker.
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
And so that’s what I always want to do – write a book that lets my readers own it in their hearts after it’s come to life in my heart.
So what would be your answer to the man who asked why read stories that are just made up?