Fiction v Nonfiction

Can great fiction do more for your personal development than all those self-help books?

Since first publishing this article, I’ve launched an entirely new project called

By the Books

, where I send out short, practical wisdom distilled from works of classic fiction twice per week.

Here’s an example:

Moby Dick - In trauma we trust

Alright, let’s kick off our exploration of fiction versus nonfiction in context of personal development.

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The case for nonfiction

The other day, a reader emailed me an apology. I’ll paraphrase:

I love fiction, but with all the craziness going on in the world, I don’t have time for it. I need to work on myself, and learn as much as I can, so I’m focused on nonfiction right now. I need to stick to real life.

I told her that I can relate.

For almost a decade, the books on the top of my “to read” list were, broadly defined, self-help books. Books about productivity, personal development, business, whatever. I liked a lot of these books. I loved many of them. I would even say some of them changed my life in clear and positive ways.

There’s a good chance that this sounds familiar to you, too.

For a long time now, the books that earn the highest social accolades are usually nonfiction. Memoirs, biographies, exposés…those books about business and productivity. Nonfiction churns out new celebrities and “thought-leaders” with far more efficacy than fiction. (That’s a topic for a whole other essay.)

It would make sense that most of this is driven by an assumption that nonfiction will have the highest and most quantifiable value. You want to learn or do X better, so you go buy and read a book about X. Simple. This might be the most significant market dynamic that drives modern publishing.

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The case for fiction

OK, this is where I’m gonna get subversive.

I have come to believe, through observation and personal experience, that it is actually good fiction that has the much greater power to change people for the better.

Human beings are creatures of narrative, which means that the best narratives will have the greatest influence on us. Since compelling fiction is centrally crafted around narrative, rather than ideas, it is often a more successful carrier of truth than nonfiction, which only uses narrative in service of ideas.

While nonfiction is intellectually stimulating, foregrounding ideas and information in a way that appeals to cerebral appetites, fiction gets root access to the soul.

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An example

In my early 20’s, I lived in a very comfortable little bubble, studying film at BYU. If you’ve never been a Mormon college student in Provo, Utah, you might not intuitively grasp just how privileged of an existence I enjoyed. Pretty much everything I wanted and needed was within very easy reach. I loved my friends, I loved my classes and projects, I loved the quaint and corny cultural scene downtown, and I loved being minutes away from the mountains, where anyone could go to enjoy some profound natural beauty.

Here’s the thing about privilege, though: it’s mostly invisible to the privileged.

Despite all the bounty I enjoyed on a daily basis, despite how relatively free of true trial and sorrow my life was, I spent most of my time in all the usual ways — nursing vain ambitions and petty resentments, pitying myself for the things I lacked and overindulging empty pleasures.

And then I read “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy.

I don’t remember why I picked it up. Probably someone I respected recommended it. Anyway I couldn’t put it down. Spare and gripping, the prose evoked vivid images of desolation that shook me to my core. In my efforts to describe the book to other people, I would frequently use the words “unrelentingly bleak.”

And yet, I could sense the book building something of profound value inside of me. As the story descended into darkness, beckoning me deeper into a world of abject horror and misery, I found myself stunned by the beauty of my life outside the book. My heart would catch in my throat at the sight of people eating lunch in a cafe. I would lie in my half-broken bed on the second floor of the messy apartment I shared with three other guys and be convinced that there was no comfort more exquisite. I would look up at the white clouds and bright sun in the blue sky on my way to class and take in lungful after lungful of that unending light.

A short time after I finished the book, I remember standing in the middle of a grocery store, and crying. Not only for the desperate hope set against wrenching sadness in the story itself, but for the overwhelming beauty of my own life. And, finally, for the fresh, raw revelation of love that defines the human experience, no matter the circumstance.

That book made me a more grateful person. It made me more sympathetic. It gave me an appreciation for how truly fragile and wonderful all our modern comforts are. It reinforced the supremacy of family as life’s ultimate aim.

In short, it changed me.

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Big Plans

A short while after that email exchange with my apologetic reader, one of my life’s missions came sharply into focus.

I will be an evangelist of literature. As I continue to write my own fiction (I really can’t help myself), I will also spend my life working to help people see that the best fiction can be even more powerful, even more useful than nonfiction.

My mission starts here, in this new section of Dispatches from Inner Space, where I will publish my research and thinking about this subject. There are already more than a dozen posts in the pipeline, and I’m barely getting started.

This project connects directly to the very root of why I started writing way back when I was a kid. Great works of fiction gave my soul life, and I wanted to learn that magic. I wanted to tell stories that would move other people in the profound and beautiful ways I had been moved. I believed then, as I do now, that this matters more than almost anything.

I’m here to preach, baby.

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If this idea resonates with you, I think you’ll like the follow up:

Everything Is (Not) Entertainment