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,...
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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/ch.....ction.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
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.
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
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
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?
I agree with the automatic wince that comes when I hear a person is only interested in non-fiction. Gasp, clutch, die. To me, the nucleus of life, of breathing and experiencing others breathe, is the dream. This is magic, this is creation, this is God play. Besides, who wants to read the dictionary to master the use of vocabulary? It’s so much better to learn a concept like ambiguity through the pages of a story like…the Seven Types of Ambiguity. Webster can put that in his pipe and smoke it.
This is really great. The part where it takes a person five times longer to finish a book of non-fiction is something that I have noticed too. And besides, it is more relaxing to read fiction because in non-fiction, I do a lot of thinking for things that I have read.
Well said Neil. I agree that alternating is a good idea. I’ve benefited wholly by doing that very thing. You want to be a complete person pull from a wide array of books.