fiction is important. dammit.
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 ( Read more... )
To make an extreme case, if one reads a steady diet of white supremacist literature like the Turner Diaries, then I doubt one's open-mindedness will increase.
Probably you won't agree with me that fiction can be harmful, but mine is not an uncommon viewpoint. As less extreme examples than the above, Don Quixote and Northanger Abbey are at least partly about mocking the silly mindsets that can be caused by overconsumption of certain kinds of stories.
To say that fiction can't have a negative effect is to devalue the importance of its content. While I would never condemn a person for reading what he or she wants to read, I have certainly felt, in my own life, that I've on occasion suffered harm from novels. For instance, I really love books that contain the pornography of oppression, like Aravind Adiga's White Tiger or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. But I often think that by presenting scenes of oppression that are far divorced from my own time and place, these books make me complacent about the oppression in modern America. Perhaps I would care more about the injustices I can see if I had not been made so vividly (and perhaps falsely) aware of how much worse things can be.
To use your own example, what if the caveman told his friend a story about a fruitful land that lies just across the desert. If his friend started walking through the desert, and the land did not exist, then he would have died because of a story.
Reply
Leave a comment