Why write fiction?

I apologise that this blog post is slightly late this week. Life tends to get in the way sometimes, doesn't it?

This week I have a question to ask. Why write fiction? It’s a fair question. There are so many great real-life stories that we can learn from documentaries, history books and newspapers, yet people continue to write fiction.

Of course, one simple answer to this question is that fiction provides us with fantasy and sci-fi stories that real life, unfortunately, cannot. But that doesn’t explain why writers continue to write, not only realist fiction, but real stories as fiction. Plenty of novels – In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (all books that I would recommend by the way) – are real life stories that have been written as fiction. Even Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally was published and sold as a fictional book.

You could argue that publishing as fiction is a way of getting more people to buy a book. But it goes further than this. These books are written with the structure and style of fictional stories. So why do we do this? Why do we continue to fictionalise the life events of real people we learnt about in our school history lessons?

The answer… because fiction makes the story real. It brings a story to life. That may sound like a paradox. I’m basically saying that lies and fabrications are more real than anything we can learn about in documentaries.

But it’s true. Fiction brings us into the minds of characters we would never have the chance to meet in real life. It takes us to new worlds, historical worlds, worlds that may never have existed. Through fiction we can experience things far better than we can through documentaries. We can discover how it felt to live through the blitz or to get trapped on a mountain. Picasso once said ‘I can’t paint a tree. But I can paint the feeling you have when you look at a tree’. And that’s what fiction does for us. It gives us more than just the facts and figures.

When Thomas Keneally writes about Oscar Schindler, we don’t just find out that he once watched a girl in a red coat during a Nazi raid. We find out how Schindler felt and how that event impacted his life. How much of that is Keneally’s fabrication and assumption almost doesn’t matter. Because the fact that Schindler is written as a character rather than a historical figure means that we can imagine ourselves in his shoes and understand how he must have felt.

Of course, this is where the line between fact and fiction starts to become blurred. But that is another blog post for another day.

What I’m really trying to draw attention to here is the power of fiction. Fiction can do things that documentary can’t. It can penetrate our minds and hearts, get people to completely change their perspective on things they’ve always had set views on, inspire sympathy and empathy in the most unlikely people. And that is why we continue to write fiction.

Thanks for reading.