Three Lessons from Reading Fiction

Fiction can get a bad rap. Some people think it’s escapist, and that it can’t possibly teach us anything. Research has shown that’s not true. Neuroscientists have shown reading fiction helps people develop empathy, for a start.

As someone who’s an avid fiction reader, I firmly believe fiction has a great deal to teach us. Specifically, there are three lessons we can learn: how to tell a story, the aforementioned concept of empathy, and organizational skills.

How to Tell a Story

Have you ever heard the phrase “The human brain is hardwired for stories?” Research revealed that stories transmit vital information; we learn through them. However, we’ll only learn if the story is compelling. A good story teaches us how to craft an engaging narrative.

What makes a story engaging, though? What makes you want to read more?

A story hooks you in when the author slowly gives away information bit by bit, and at the right time. The information has to be relevant and feed the reader’s curiosity, though. It’s a delicate balance, not giving away too much, and revealing things that will drive the story forward.

There are two books that I read in 2023 that I believe can teach us how to tell good stories: The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell and Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto.

The Golden Spoon chronicles a TV cooking show (similar to The Great British Bake Off). Betsy Martin, the show’s loveable host, has been dubbed “America’s Grandmother.” Yet, Betsy has some secrets…and so do almost all the contestants on her show. And some people have secrets they’d kill to protect.

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is about a woman who runs an all-but-forgotten tea house in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Her life is much the same: open the tea house, serve her single, loyal customer, then close up shop for the day…until the morning when she finds a dead body in her store. Then, Vera decides she’s going to solve the murder, and begins lining up suspects.

Maxwell and Sutanto keep readers’ attention by doling out tiny bits of information. The reader absolutely must know what happens next. They can’t put the book down. Reading these books is like taking a masterclass in storytelling; they’re excellent examples of how to craft engaging tales that will hold your readers’ attention.

Empathy

Sometimes, we come across novels in which we can relate to the main character. They’re not exactly like us, but there are enough similarities that we can say, “I know what that person is going through.”

It would get very boring if all we read about were characters who were like us, though. We also read fiction to broaden our horizons. We want to understand others’ experiences.

Enter fiction, a great tool for building empathy. Empathy means to experience someone else’s emotions (whereas sympathy refers to understanding someone’s emotions). When we read fiction about someone else’s experience that’s vastly different than our own, we have the chance to feel what that person is going through.

Kissing Kosher by Jean Meltzer, also published in 2023, is an excellent book for building your empathy muscle. It’s a love story about Avital Cohen and Ethan Lippmann, grandchildren of two rival kosher bakers. Ethan is tasked by his emotionally abusive grandfather with infiltrating the Cohen bakery to steal their top-secret pumpkin spice babka recipe. What Ethan doesn’t count on is falling in love with Avital, the bakery’s manager.

Avital lives with an interstitial cystitis diagnosis. Her condition means she spends her days navigating intense pain. Her pain shapes every part of her life: her work, how she dresses, what she eats, and her sex life.

If you’ve never even heard of interstitial cystitis (like me), the book is an eye-opener. While no single book can accurately depict what it’s like to live with a particular chronic illness, Kissing Kosher sheds enormous light on what life can be like with this condition. By reading it, you gain a new understanding into what someone else has lived through, as well as how you can be more understanding toward people living with chronic conditions.

Organizational Skills

Even if a story is told from more than one viewpoint and contains several intertwining narrative threads, a good story is well-organized. When the author reveals something, a reader shouldn’t have to flip back dozens of pages to say, “Oh, I see.” Instead, the reader should be able to quickly pick up the thread.

Two great examples of organizational skills in fiction are in The Golden Spoon and Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. Both of these stories are told by multiple narrators (in the case of The Golden Spoon, there are seven narrators, while Vera Wong has five).

Yet, none of these narrative threads are ever tangled. It was easy to figure out what was happening and to whom. The books’ organizational structures are a testament to eagle-eyed editors, yes, but also to the authors themselves. They plotted and meticulously planned what would happen in each chapter, so that the story would make sense and flow easily.

Adding Fiction to Your Bookshelf

The best part about fiction is that there’s so much of it. There are so many genres (and sub-genres), so you have a wide range of books to choose from. Don’t like murder mysteries or romantic comedies? No problem. There’s science fiction. There’s historical fiction. There’s literary fiction. The list is long.

Pick up a fiction book this weekend, and you might be pleasantly surprised by the lessons you’ll find between the pages.

What other lessons have you learned from reading fiction?