fiction is important. dammit.

[moschus]

cross-posted from Tribal Writer

1

Most aspiring fiction writers don’t read enough fiction, which is like a fighter going into the ring with one hand tied behind her back. The game is over before it started. I’ve written about this before - Reading is the Inhale, Writing is the Exhale: Developing Writer’s Intuition - and posted about it in

Comments

[ext_428193]

I think there's a difference between saying fiction "has value" and fiction is "important." Its important to society, and its nice, but reading fiction is not an important part of most adult lives.

For most of middle school and early highschool, I read an obscene amount of fantasy and sci-fi, from CS Lewis to Tolkien to random books chosen because of the spaceship on the cover. I loved it, and it helped me build a nice vocabulary. It stretched my imagination, and I was often inspired by the protagonists.

But, now I am 22 years old and the simple fact is I have so many better things to do than invest my time in someone else's fantasy world.

I spend a lot of my free time reading, but its usually hard to pass up politics, world events, finance, technology, science, and philosophy, just to read about a sexy vampire for hours at a time!

The fact is, with a solid education under my belt, I've already read a good percentage of the "great," "classic" novels, and I am rarely inspired to immerse myself in the someone else's fantasy unless it comes highly recommended. I've got a few books on my to-do list at any given time and I end up reading about 2 novels per year, but come on, its not that big of a deal.

[moschus]

You sound like an engineer.

Read a "good percentage" of the "great, classic" novels by the ripe old age of 22? Oh please. Come on. Don't cut yourself off so early. Great fiction gets so much richer as you get older and more mature and able to bring a lot more to the experience.

Fiction develops empathy, the ability to see things from different perspectives. That is a very big deal, and something that certain engineers, and "logical" thinkers, could use a lot more of.

Fiction develops insight and understanding into the very experience of being human: it's where technology, politics, religion, psychology, etc., intersect and collide, depending on what kind of novel you choose.

And that is fucking important.

[moschus]

By the age of 22 you don't have a solid education under your belt; you have a solid foundation to what should become a lifelong education. When you get to be as ancient as I am -- 38 -- and look back and see yourself at 22, and how much you thought you knew at the time, you'll see what I mean. :)

[ext_428193]

Eerily perceptive - I AM an engineer! (You can probably guess how I came to discover this blog, ha-ha.) I definitely see your point about fiction helping to develop empathy. And based on how naive I currently think of my 18-year-old self as having been, I'm sure you're right about the older/wiser thing too.

I'm not even sure what my point was in the above post to be honest... I don't want to come off as sounding like I think fiction is unimportant, I guess I was just spouting off my rationalization for why I read so much less than I used to. Anyways its nice that you respond to comments on here, thanks!