The best fiction is actually really good non-fiction.
The first book I remember reading all the way through is The Kid Who Only Hit Homers by Matt Christopher. I was 8 or 9, if memory serves. The book is about a Little League baseball player who is having trouble getting hits. He encounters a magical being (one that oddly resembles Babe Ruth), who promises to make him the best player on his team. Shortly thereafter, the kid proceeds to hit home runs each time he swings the bat.
Whether or not this mysterious magical being actually exists or not, and whether he had anything to do with the kid’s athletic transformation, is an underlying mystery of the story. It’s a device that kept my young fingers eagerly turning the pages. It is what hooked me when so many other stories for young people failed to catch my interest. And as I look back on the fiction that I have read, it reminds me of something that I realized early on in college: the divide between fiction and non-fiction is illusory.
Please don’t be offended, fiction writers. After all, some of my best friends are fiction writers! (which means I can say whatever I want. That’s how race-related comments work too, right?)
All I mean here is this:
Good fiction — the kind that captures people and holds onto them for longer than the handful of hours they’re reading — is actually doing the dirty work of non-fiction. It is revealing deep truths about our world, about the human condition, about reality in general. It is solving mysteries and playing with real emotions.
For me, as a 9-year-old reading a book about a kid finding his groove at the plate, there was a comment on human psychology that I picked up — without being totally aware of it. The underlying comment was this: sometimes we believe things that others see as absurd, but those beliefs are powerful. I couldn’t spell it out, because Matt Christopher (the author) didn’t spell it out explicitly in the book. Instead, he used a made-up story to gesture at an important truth.
And that’s the thing about fiction. It can be (and often is) better at telling us true things about our world than non-fiction is. That’s because non-fiction tells us truths about our world — dryly and explicitly. Fiction, on the other hand, shows us truths, poetically and emotively.
Fiction has the vehicle of abstraction that non-fiction really doesn’t. Fiction possesses the ability to abstract away from all of the people, places, and things of our world — all the details that weigh our minds down, and keep them from thinking freely. It abstracts away from all those things and frees us, thus allowing ourselves to take a bird’s eye view of our world, through the lens of a different one.
Now, there is some fiction that simply tells a story, presents a mystery, and entertains. But I would submit that if that’s all it does, it’s largely forgotten soon after publication. The memorable stuff, the great stories, are memorable precisely because they scratched through the surface and tickled our collective consciousness. They constructed a series of falsehoods and managed to discover the truth.
So if I’m so concerned with getting at the underlying truths of the world, why don’t I write fiction? Good question. It has everything to do with me. I’m impatient and I’m just no good at constructing characters and a plot. So I take the easy way out. I write things like these, that pop into my head, and pique my interest.
I’ll leave it to the pros to write the prose.
I write a bunch of stuff like this. If you liked it, consider subscribing to Woolgathering, my weekly newsletter. I think you’ll like it.