I don't understand the appeal of reading fiction.

duncancallum – more accurately Farnworth. Hence Moses Gate.

I’m not angry.
I’m just very, very disappointed (that I didn’t think of that first).
😀

Aahhh it’s all so clear now…

So aksfords timber employed Joe…..

Never knew that. Makes religion so much more believable when you can relate to it.

Need to contact last drop village it might be a UNESCO site.

No fiction makes you firmly non religious then 😉

Since this is a thread is a discussion in ethics, where does the OP stand on theoretical physics? Or philosophical treatises?

I don’t think I’m very good at binary….

1

Such economy of prose.

I greedily gobble factual books like pies and gravy. I only have to see the name of a old house on a map and I look it up, determine the history of the place amd its owners. I also need to know how things work. And read how brave explorers braved the barely explorable places. Etc.

Why would I read ‘fiction’? (you didn’t distinguish between fiction and literature so shall assume both under the same umbrella of ‘non-factual’)

It’s easier to rhetorically enquire as to why would I wish to miss out on:

Satire

Parable

Parody

Allegory

Comedy

Poetry

Discworld 8)

The best fiction for me is that which sets my heart on fire simply because it is so true*. Stories that speak to universal and personal experience, those archetypes/archetypal situations told in such a way to be beyond the scope of dry factual passages written as a document.

More practically – There is research to show that reading fiction can actually awaken and sharpen the readers mind. Real-life skills such as empathy and emotional intelligence seem to be aided by reading fiction.

It probably needs not be stated that not all writers are equal. This means that there is fiction, and then there is fiction.

Fact – A man once found a pearl. It was later reported that his fortunes had changed since finding this pearl.
Fiction – ‘The Pearl’ by John Steinbeck.

*

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They’re Caeser’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, “Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal.” Most of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”
? Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

OP – Maybe have a go at ‘Sarum’ by Edward Rutherfurd? ie an historical fiction – reaching from modern Salisbury back to the time when a massive land bridge became the English Channel. History told with a human perspective of times that have very little written record, yet enough to fuel such an epic. Found it engrossing and learned a lot about the religious/political history of England and how it shaped our culture, also much about medieval masonry ie the mind-blowing achievement of Salisbury Cathedral. I think that good historical fiction brings otherwise dry history to life, ie the ‘truth within a lie’.

Your question has really gotten me thinking now as can’t imagine how crap it would be without fiction. Imagine:

No ‘Orlando’
No ‘Hamlet’
No ‘Old Man and The Sea’
No ‘The Little Prince’
No ‘Three Men in A Boat’
No ‘Oh Whistle And I’ll Come To You’
No ‘Breakfast of Champions’
No ‘Odyssey’
No ‘Snow Falling On Cedars’
No ‘A Christmas Carol’
Etc forever

Also makes me wonder what our culture would resemble if we didn’t love fiction? Anyone?

What a horribly depressing thought. I wonder what our culture would resemble if we didn’t love fiction? Anyone?

People may start to engage with the world around them rather than escaping from it via books and movies written for children. They may start to see that narrative, creativity and imagination exists in all facets of life and not just within the pages of a book.

People may start to engage with the world around them rather than escaping from it via books and movies written for children.

But not all fictional books are written for children. I tend to think that we are witnessing the beginning of the end (or at least a mass decline) in the appreciation of fiction (especially literature) as people tune in more and more to youtube and other social media for endless snippets of the world around them. Think globalism on the scale of a drive-thru prank channel.

I also believe that we are (culturally) becoming less kind, less reflective, less patient, less empathic and more cynical. Books are still the things that connect us to the minds of lomg-dead peoples individual thoughts and cultural experience, so it helps us know where we come from, and where we might be going. Better still, where we would not wish to go? (again, Fanrenheit 451 comes to mind)

People may start to engage with the world around them rather than escaping from it via books and movies written for children. They may start to see that narrative, creativity and imagination exists in all facets of life and not just within the pages of a book.

I think this is a very closed minded and illogical stance to take.

At a superficial level fiction may be escapism. But to my mind fiction is a way of explaining and understanding the world by presenting the information in different ways and exploring different possibilities.

As soon as a human puts narrative to their experiences and tries to convey complex ideas it becomes at least partly fiction. It is certainly never the whole truth. I firmly believe that our ability to create anything at all implicitly relies on being able to create things that aren’t true in our minds. If we couldn’t do this then we would never progress. Fiction books are merely one aspect of this.

We mythologise and reinvent our past to enable us to deal with our present.
The myths original meanings change and evolve as our concept of what it is to be human evolves.

You only need to look at Snopes to see the power of modern storytelling. Many stories are so good, it doesn’t matter if they’re true or not.

Fiction can also give us ideas about what the future can be. Going on a ride today using GPS? Geostationary satellites were thought up by Arthur C Clarke. Could someone have thought of them without inspiration? Sure – but someone else thinking of the big ideas helps a lot.

Malvern Rider gets it.

The novel at its best is art. What the OP suggests is that we should just stick with photography or seeing the real thing, and ignore painting.

I tend to think that we are witnessing the beginning of the end (or at least a mass decline) in the appreciation of fiction (especially literature)

Our experiences and emotions are increasingly being infantalised and commercialised and sold back to us.

What the OP suggests is that we should just stick with photography or seeing the real thing, and ignore painting.

Photography can be art too, of course, just as some painting isn’t 😉

Is the common thread that all art makes you look at things from a different viewpoint? A factual book can tell you a different point of view, but it can’t get inside your head and twist it in a different direction.

Sorry, BenCooper, photography can absolutely be art. I was just thinking more about the idea of straight ‘cataloging with a camera’ as opposed to interpretive photography.

The other point being missed by the OP is that a factual book is based on actual events recorded by someone else, so viewed from their perspective then arranged in a nice story by the writer, adapted by their editor etc

Every factual book is a narrative that someone has constructed for you, based on their interpretation of events.

There are no factual books,

Except the Bible, obvs.

Excellent article about the history of fairytales as traced through ethnography and linguistics

Going back to at least the bronze age
http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/1/150645

Geostationary satellites were thought up by Arthur C Clarke. Could someone have thought of them without inspiration? Sure – but someone else thinking of the big ideas helps a lot.

Although that’s true, it has little to do with his fiction writing.

He wrote scientific papers as well as science fiction. The satellite stuff was in a science magazine.

Ok, let’s not criticise the OP too much here. In condemning him for his closed mind you are simply showing your own closed minds!

Everyone’s brain is different. And this is OK. There is plenty of fiction, art and music that leaves me cold. As it happens, there is also plenty I enjoy. But we all enjoy things differently.

An ex gf and I enjoyed similar music. However we listened to it completely differently. She was not paying much attention to the actual music, more the words; and for me vice versa. So to her it was almost a literary form. She was baffled when I didn’t know any of the words months after acquiring it. I could however easily play it back to you on a guitar.

So for each of us, the world is a pretty different thing, and that is cool. Don’t criticise us for it. Until I was about 10nor so I refused all fiction, because it was crap.

there are so many interesting things in real life, that there’s simply no need to invent new ones.

That’s not why people invent new things. Fiction is a way of talking about the world and understanding it.

I also believe that we are (culturally) becoming less kind, less reflective, less patient, less empathic and more cynical.

Absolutely not true! Do you know any history?

Oldest ones found so far are about 41,000 years old, Homo Ergaster/Erectus was knocking about for 160,000 years longer than that, and I’ll bet singing and chatting over a fire. Bet Ugh’s story about that crappy mammoth hunt was a crowd pleaser every time, and he never needed that much encouragement to tell it again

Well… maybe not. ‘Biologically Modern’ humans have been around for about 200,000 years – but theres only evidence for ‘Behaviourially Modern’ humans for about 40,000. One of the things that makes humans interesting compared to other species is behaviourally we’re un-programmed (compared to other species that are born a mini versions of their parents and are walking and running within hours humans we have comparatively little instinct and take years to learn how to act like our fellow humans). We’re also the only species that teaches as well as learns – the rest of the great apes will learn from watching their peers (monkey see monkey do) but while a mother will happily be watched by their offspring and repeat actions until they are learned they don’t instruct. Humans have a cycle of learn – innovate/improve – teach so that each generation gets better at a given task.

For those 160,000 years it seemed humans had all the hardware to be just like us but non of the software. Its quite possible they had no language (verbal or visual) and no ‘story’ to their lives the same way that we do. When you think of your own thoughts its very difficult to grasp what your thoughts would consist of if they weren’t articulated, internally, as words.

So those early humans looked like us but wouldn’t be recognisable as us in anyway in terms of their behaviour, relations with each other or relation to the world

That’s not why people invent new things. Fiction is a way of talking about the world and understanding it.

It was an interesting reflection made by the astronauts that were part of the moon landings, particularly when it seems humans are unlikely to return any time soon, that very few people have travelled to the moon, soon they’ll all be gone, and non of them were artists – that they undertook this extraordinary human experience and non of them feel the have the skills to emote that experience in a way that the rest of the world can share in fully. I think something that is perhaps misunderstood about any kind of creative art is that its not about ‘making stuff up’. Theres an element of innovation, maybe things are transposed into fantasy, but what artists of any sort really do is look, engage and experience real stuff, real life, find the essence in it and reflect it back.

For those 160,000 years it seemed humans had all the hardware to be just like us but non of the software. Its quite possible they had no language (verbal or visual) and no ‘story’ to their lives the same way that we do.

it’s equally possible that they did. absence of evidence… an all that’ 😀

Photography can be art too, of course, just as some painting isn’t

Is the common thread that all art makes you look at things from a different viewpoint? A factual book can tell you a different point of view, but it can’t get inside your head and twist it in a different direction.

Sort of this, IMO. Art is a means of communicating something, by the written word, or by creating something on a canvas or out of marble, or in sound, or in form (dance), whatever. It works (again IMO) by bypassing the places in your head that translate feelings or ideas into some other thing and going directly “emotion to emotion”. Its persistence and presence in every culture at every age seems to me to be proof that it works!

Absolutely not true! Do you know any history?

🙄

I’ve been around a while, and while my feelings about interpersonal trends are not scientific (simply impressions gained from personal observation over the last thirty-odd years) a quick Google throws up some data which seems to support the impressions I have*

Since the creation of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index in 1979, tens of thousands of students have filled out this questionnaire while participating in studies examining everything from neural responses to others’ pain to levels of social conservatism. Konrath and her colleagues took advantage of this wealth of data by collating self-reported empathy scores of nearly 14,000 students. She then used a technique known as cross-temporal meta-analysis to measure whether scores have changed over the years. The results were startling: almost 75 percent of students today rate themselves as less empathic than the average student 30 years ago.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-me-care/

*I’m not beholden to the impression and would be grateful to learn otherwise. For balance and context – I enjoyed Steven Pinkers observations about violence. It seems that we are possibly becoming less violent, yet I’m aware of dehumanising socio-political cycles that precipitate massive violence. That we could also be less kind, less empathic at the same time as being less violent is a strange state of affairs, I must admit.

maccruiskeen I thought that was really well observed and food for thought. Particularly:

It was an interesting reflection made by the astronauts that were part of the moon landings…

Don’t know how true it is but sure I read once that the original Druids/bards would apprentice for 30 years in order to qualify. Learning everything in the spoken tradition. The tales themselves were run through with quite profound symbolism and a greater meaning that could never have been imparted via dry reference.

Alan Garner springs to mind.

People may start to engage with the world around them rather than escaping from it via books and movies written for children. They may start to see that narrative, creativity and imagination exists in all facets of life and not just within the pages of a book.

A strange thing to say – what is the difference between fiction and imagination? In any case, fiction deals with issues that a non-fiction account cannot – describing thoughts and feelings and emotions. The non-fiction writer cannot describe truthfully any thougts but his own.

How much science fact would we have without science fiction introducing the ideas?

There’re so many interesting ideas in fiction.
And herein lies my point; there are so many interesting things in real life, that there’s simply no need to invent new ones.

Of course there are countless interesting things in real life, and I find much of it endlessly fascinating, but, it’s there all the time, and my mind demands that, for pleasure, I read lots of stuff that is fiction, much fairly escapist, but with very strong basis in reality; William Gibson being a case in point: he was the author who, in the early eighties, created the term ‘cyberspace’, a term he had to go to court to stop it from being appropated by a commercial enterprise. He imagined a whole bunch of technologies that are only now, in many cases, actually starting to appear in technology articles.
I’ve just finished a fiction book about a tattooist growing up in Morcambe in the period just after WW1, then moving to New York and Coney Island in the 30’s; the descriptions of the places, the people and the attitudes are far more interesting and fascinating than some dry, factual prose.
I have a vivid imagination, but no creativity; I rely on creative people, artists, writers, musicians, to create wonderful, vivid works that then allow my imagination to really go to work.
One of my favourite authors, Neil Gaiman, has had several of his books turned into TV’s series and movies; would the OP avoid watching those, because they came from works of fiction, and are fiction themselves?
Or any other great movies, for that matter?

Much of the fiction I read is other people wondering ‘what if…?’

I also wonder that myself quite a lot, but I’m interested in other people’s wonderings too. It’s like wondering is a hobby for lots of people. I like to read other people’s wonderings in the same way I might like to read about other people’s bike adventures.

And sometimes, other people answer the question ‘what if…?’ in ways I haven’t thought of.

see… the thing is that while there are undoubtedly many interesting things in ‘real life’ the imagination of a human being is as much a part of real life as anything else.. and is just as interesting..

you don’t decide not to be interested in ladybirds, or history or physics.. so why would you decide not to be interested in a person’s imagination?

I reckon a psychologist would suspect ‘issues’

What exactly is wrong with escapism anyway?

What exactly is wrong with escapism anyway?

Exactly. One of the problems with such a question is agreeing upon how the term ‘escape’ is being used in that context (ie suppositional)

J R R Tolkien ‘On Fairy Stories’:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape”is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word,and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter

And in any case, ‘escape’ via literature is usually not that, because fiction reflects our own actual world. You’re not really going anywhere.

What exactly is wrong with escapism anyway?

Nothing. It’s something everyone does, in their own way. Some people read/watch fiction, others don’t.

But the popularity of SF and fantasy could be viewed as a symtpom of a society which creates so many unhappy, unfulfilled, stressed and scared people.

Rather than trying to change any of this, we’ve just found ways to make it more palatable – by blocking the world out.

Simon Pegg talked about similar kind of thing recently:
Obsession with sci fi and fantasy

I had a cowork scoff at my reading material because it was fiction, I asked him what he was reading and it was a book on Gengus khan. I took the book off him and flicked to the notes at the back and found that author had left characters out renamed others or merged several characters into a single one. Hmm not very factual! I pointed out that if we worked together all day then both wrote about it we’d both remember the day differently so whose report would be factual? They can’t both be about the same thing and be different and factual! Can they?
There is no such thing as factual literature, only peoples interpretations as per all human culture. Fact! 😉

Hmmmm. I haven’t read much fiction for years (I’m currently diligently learning facts about the failure of GDP statistics to fully reflect how good an invention the washing machine was).

My imagination doesn’t work terrifically well with books. Something that is described to me by a writer doesn’t usually hit home – in my mind it’s all a bit bloodless and low-key and I end up underwhelmed and pining for something with some maps or a graph in it, that I can understand in a way that matters to me.

I enjoy film and TV fiction immensely, although some of my favourite things are still documentaries.

🙂

But the popularity of SF and fantasy could be viewed as a symtpom of a society which creates so many unhappy, unfulfilled, stressed and scared people.

Rather than trying to change any of this, we’ve just found ways to make it more palatable – by blocking the world out.
But then reading some of the more adult sci-fi out there it’s really just another way to dress up and show the current world and it’s problems. A good tale is a good tale, sometimes it’s set in space and other times it’s in a more real life.
Fiction can give us the ability to tackle real life issues with some of the sensitivity removed. You could take a sensationalist factual book on something controversial and a well balanced fiction work on the same topic. Is one more valid than the other, is it easier to look at recent events through the eyes of those that still live or to look at the events separating them from the baggage of emotion and the sensitivity of the people involved.

Is the Hurt Locker less valid than American Sniper. (for a film comparison)

Is the Hurt Locker less valid than American Sniper.

To my mind, “based on a true story” stuff doesn’t get “non-fiction” status.

A documentary having a shot at critically evaluating the truth or otherwise of Chris Kyle’s memoir and Eastwood’s dramatisation of it is non-fiction (although many such efforts would suffer from terrible failures of objectivity). American Sniper itself isn’t.

That point is important, because of Donald Trump’s willingness to show 13 Hours[/url] as a warm-up for his rallies…

🙂