364. Truth And Fiction

When you’re reading a work of fiction, you might encounter something that doesn’t seem right. It could be anything, but suppose it’s the reaction of a particular character to a terrible discovery. The reaction reported in the story doesn’t feel plausible to you because you know you would never react in that way.

But allowing for the fact that the person in the story is not you, you might be willing to accept that they could respond quite differently than you would. You would let go of the discrepancy and continue reading. You know that since this is a work of fiction, you shouldn’t expect absolute realism from everything you find in it. Even if the implausibilities continued to stack up, you might press on, accepting that the world of the story is just different from the world you live in.

Despite these seemingly obvious falsehoods, there is something else in the story that feels valuable to you. Perhaps it’s just that the story is entertaining, but often there is something more than this as well. While the characters and events have been entirely fabricated by the author, you can detect truth at the heart of the story.

Even for the most realistic story, events in reality would never happen for you exactly as the author describes them. The same situation could play out in ten or twenty different ways, and only one of these is the one depicted in the story. Regardless, fiction still manages to reveal truths about actual life and the experience of being human.

If you can lean into these truths and allow yourself to explore them, then you are more likely to benefit from them. While the tale you’re being told is probably not how things will go for you, there is still an incredible bounty to be gained from those aspects of the work that are imbued with truth.