I’m a bit weird among writers, because I don’t condemn television. On the contrary, I think that everyone, and especially serious writers, should watch a lot of television, including television comedies and dramas, because the audio / visual format provides a perspective that cannot be obtained by reading a novel. This goes against the common spiel that television is a scourge that should be removed from the entertainment landscape.
On the other hand, the recent trend has been to watch more television and more movies and read less, and when reading, read non-fiction rather than fiction. The reasons given range from “Reading is difficult” to “Novels are not informative.” But what most people don’t realize is that the written word, and fiction in particular, brings benefits that you can’t get from other media. For example:
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Reading fiction can help you improve your skills with people. A 2008 study by Raymond Mar found that people who read more fiction perform better on tests of empathy and social insight, and that people who read more nonfiction works perform better. lower. This may be because through fiction, you experience characters’ interactions and social relationships in a way that is impossible with most non-fiction.
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Reading fiction stimulates the imagination. As you read fiction, your mind reconstructs each scene in much more detail than the author described it. You do this by visualizing non-existent people and places from history, often basing these visualizations on real people and places that you have seen. This is the human capacity to imagine, daydream, speculate, reflect. The ability to imagine separates us from other animals. It allows us to strategize, plan, reason, learn, create a better world than the one that existed before.
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Books are cheaper hours of entertainment than movies or DVDs. Especially in tough economic times, it makes sense to encourage the enjoyment of written fiction. For the same amount that a 2-hour movie or DVD costs, you can get a book that will entertain you for days or weeks. Or you can borrow it from your local library for free.
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Reading relieves stress and is not overly stimulating like television does. Most modern television programming is designed to grab your attention by constantly pinging your brain with abrupt sounds and transitions. This prepares your brain and creates stress. Research from the University of Sussex found that reading can reduce stress levels by up to 68 percent. Or as cognitive neuropsychologist Dr. David Lewis said, “Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation.”
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Fiction allows us to enter the narrative, to imagine ourselves there, in ways that non-fiction cannot. Even a biography is already finished before you start reading it, because it is about a real person. Even if you don’t know the specific story of a particular biographical figure, biographies are rarely written about losers, while the loser is the staple of the fictional story. Or as an English teacher from Wichita, Kansas put it, “The unknowableness of fiction makes it very much like life as we experience it.”
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The mind absorbs new information more easily through stories. Human beings are creatures of history by nature, learning through experience and metaphor. Teaching through storytelling is a tradition as old as human thought itself. This is one of the reasons why, although fiction is about people who never existed and events that never happened, all fictional people and events are based on reality. As the psychologists Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell explain in their book Dreamy reality, “The reason that the stories are so satisfying and enlightening is that they take advantage of the same process that nature uses for the transmission of knowledge.”
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Reading, and reading fiction in particular, can make you a better speaker and writer. In modern times, communication skills are more important than ever. And since storytelling is a key skill for transmitting knowledge, you will become a better communicator if you learn to tell stories. And the best way to learn to tell stories is to see how they are told. In general, exposure to language, such as when reading, will instinctively improve your own language and communication skills.
Still can’t imagine reading a whole novel? Try the short story. Yes, the story has been dying for a long time, but that is because the readers have not been interested. Even so, collections of newly released and classic short stories continue to be published, and for the busy 21st century citizen, the short story offers the benefits of fiction in small portions that can be more easily enjoyed.
Fiction should be a staple in everyone’s lifestyle, because anyone who doesn’t read it at least occasionally is missing out on the benefits it offers.