There is a public misconception that needs to be corrected.
I realized this when my agent told me he represented a book that had been nominated for the National Book Award. Despite its critical acclaim, it had sold, he said, only two thousand copies.
Afterward, I was talking to my publicist at HarperCollins. And she was discussing how it was nearly impossible for a first-time novelist to get significant press.
In the meantime, most of the people I know who had one day dreamed of writing the great American novel are not writing it anymore. Instead, they’re working on the great American memoir.
Most of us know that literary fiction, these days, is a third-class citizen.
However, what many don’t realize is that the genre seems to be overlooked by book buyers for the wrong reason.
Here’s what seems to be happening:
People often tell me that they only read non-fiction. And, even though all my books are non-fiction, this pains me to hear. This is because I wouldn’t be writing non-fiction if it weren’t for reading fiction. (See tomorrow’s blog post for more on those specific books.)
When I ask them why they favor non-fiction, they explain that it’s because they like getting information and learning things. At first glance, this makes a lot of sense. We have moved beyond the information age, and are now in an age of information neediness.
Whatever your area of interest may be, whether it’s Washington politics or celebrity gossip, the news changes in a matter of minutes. Subscribing to a magazine no longer serves the purpose of keeping up; only an RSS feed can keep a person current.
We’ve also become needy in our personal development: we are constantly blitzed with images of people who are prettier, wealthier, healthier, happier, and more spiritually evolved than us. And we are then sold on the possibility that a book or a course is the path to this ideal. Consequently, some people believe that it’s wasteful to spend their time reading anything that doesn’t appear on the surface to make them better at something.
Thus, most people have the notion that if they are going to set aside part of the day to read – and it’s getting harder for most to find time to read with the Internet competing for their attention – it should be something useful.
And non-fiction has somehow become synonymous with usefulness.
This, then, is the misconception that needs to be corrected in the popular imagination.
The truth is that a long list of numbered points is a lot more difficult to learn from and internalize than a story. The human mind learns best through metaphor. Everyone from Aristotle to today’s child psychologists have noted that, outside of actual experience, metaphors best facilitate learning.
“Without metaphors, ideas are dry and slip through your ears without a second thought,” Jonathan Frye puts it nicely (and metaphorically) in a blog I stumbled across while researching the topic That’s why many of the mainstream self-help books that become national phenomena, whether fiction like The Celestine Prophecies or non-fiction like Tuesdays With Morrie, weave simple advice that could be summed up in a page into the form of a book-long story.
Personally, I’ve learned a lot of small lessons from non-fiction, and certainly accumulated a wealth of facts. But it is ideas that fuel one’s life, not facts. And the ideas that have sunk into my consciousness over the course of a few hundred pages of fiction are the ones that have come to define my principles and influence the life decisions I’ve made. In tomorrow’s blog, I’ll go over a few of those books.
So while non-fiction may have a greater quantity of information, literary fiction has provided me with not just better quality information but also more useful information – all of which I’ve been able to absorb at a much deeper level.
Finally, for those utilitarians who still insist on the practical superiority of non-fiction, the truth is that fiction is much more efficient. It takes most people at least five times longer to finish a 350-page book of facts than it does to finish an equally long story that pulls readers through each page and excites them enough to dedicate every free second to reading more.
So, at the very least, to those reading this who only consume non-fiction, consider at least alternating between truth and fiction. The richer and more diverse your literary intake, the richer and more diverse you’ll become as a person. After all, as anyone who’s bought into the latest advice glut of books and documentaries about the power of positive thinking knows, the road to self-improvement and self-discovery begins in the imagination.
–Neil Strauss
Bart Said,
July 6, 2008 @ 3:51 am
To my surprise I saw an article in the New Scientist of 28 June 2008 “The science of fiction” by Keith Oatley the day after I read your blog.
See: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19826621.700-the-science-of-fiction.html
Oatley (with his research group) proposed that a piece of fiction is a kind of simulation of the social world. He found an increase of peoples social skills after reading fiction. His research even suggests an immediate effect of reading fiction!
Here is Oatley’s blog: http://onfiction.blogspot.com/
You can access some of the papers here: http://onfiction.googlepages.com/home
Bart Said,
July 6, 2008 @ 5:01 pm
What happened to my reaction?
Thom Said,
January 13, 2009 @ 4:11 am
I found this piece to be a bit of a reminder. I used to read fiction all the time growing up until I hit somewhere in high school. Nowadays even if I were to read fiction- I wouldn’t know where to start to find something that I would enjoy.
I agree though- I have flown through 4-500 page fiction books in matter of a few day to a week whereas I’ll have to force myself to read my college textbooks.
Kristijan Said,
March 21, 2009 @ 11:50 am
Hey Neil
I have your book The Game, super good book.
Are you coming to visit Danmark Copenhagen, when you come to Europe?
Many greetings
Kristijan
Chris D Said,
June 3, 2009 @ 11:20 am
It’s funny, I’ve been trying to characterize the kind of non-fiction I read, and I’ve come up with the term “research narrative”: I only read non-fiction that tells a good story. I’ve been using Mark Kurlansky’s books as the canonical example, but _Emergency_ is very much in that vein. Had you simply described what you did, I would have skimmed it and taken notes but not really enjoyed it. Instead it was a story of you and your life and how you chose experiences that changed you in ways you didn’t expect.
It was also fascinating that you wanted to learn the same things I want to learn, but coming from a different place: you were afraid of something happening, whereas I recognize that disasters can strike any time, but I also take a pure joy in learning things, especially things that might be useful or that not many people know.
In some ways I don’t read fiction because I already find this world to be so awesomely interesting. =)
Thanks for a great book.
Chris
John Higgins Said,
June 3, 2010 @ 8:02 am
I was just thinking, earlier today, that my skills with dealing with people were very strong, but I lacked the preliminary ability to get in the door.
What gave me that ability was reading The Game. The truth is, while I learned a lot from the book, the most important thing I learned was that the techniques for picking a girl up didn’t really matter.
Every guru has his own, often very different and sometimes very close to contradictory, methods. The more I looked at this the more I realized that there are as many ways to get a person to notice you, and to spark their interest, as their are individuals in the world.
Of course, the codified rules and methodologies are useful, and they were necessary for illuminating the fundamentals of attraction and rapport. But the key to every method that works - and the thing that separates them from the ones that don’t - seems to be a strong frame. If you have more control over the reality surrounding you than the people you’re dealing with, and the confidence to maintain it, you can succeed with people doing damn near anything.
Now I get it. In the fiction I’ve always read, there are seducers, there are aloof ideologues, and a million other archetypes to boot. I had all the social experience, through this fictional lens, that I could want - except for one critical failing. You see, the characters in novels have no problem initiating each other. They literally CAN’T - unless the characters interact, there’s no story and so there’s no novel.
I learned how to talk to people, to charm them and persuade them, but I never learned how to MEET them!
The Game changed that, and it only did so because it wasn’t a how-to. It was a story. Though it is a true story, it could just have easily been a well-crafted piece of contemporary fiction - there is pacing, there is plot, there is characterization. Because of this, its lessons are easily internalized (though they might not have been worth a damn unless the real world had borne them out).
So thank you, Neil, because without you I’d have been missing a big piece of what it means to be a man - and who doesn’t want a big piece added to their manhood?