Last week I talked about commercial fiction and mentioned that commercial fiction is “what most people want”. This week, I’d like to explore that notion a bit further.
Storytelling is, at base, entertainment. Fiction is merely the written extension of storytelling. Ever since human beings gathered around a fire at the end of the day, they’ve been telling each other stories. When writing was invented, the good stories were written down and thus fiction was born.
When I surveyed my mailing list subscribers not too long ago and asked why they read fiction, almost everyone who answered said it was to escape. We look for the excitement that’s lacking in our lives in the stories someone else wrote down about people with more exciting lives than our own.
H. Bedford-Jones perhaps put it best, when he wrote that the business of fiction “is simply to make its readers forget their troubles.”
As a writer, let me confess right now that part of the reason I write is to vicariously experience the lives of the characters I create — lives far more exciting than my own.
And since I’m a reader as well, I’ll confess right now I read in order to vicariously experience things I never could in real life. I’m an armchair survivalist, adventurer, private investigator, monster hunter, you name it.
Romance novels are perhaps the best proof that fiction exists for entertainment. They are the ultimate in escapist literature. The romance novel, in all its forms, provides the reader with the perfect experience of love. We all desire to find Mr or Miss Right. And we can do so in the pages of a romance novel. When in reality we may not be so lucky.
But maybe you’re happily married, or happily settled in with your partner, and you have no need to dream about that perfect relationship. On the other hand, your job… Now that’s another story.
However, in the pages of a book, you can experience any job you want. Or you can do your job on Mars, or Delta Cygnus IV.
Don’t have a lot of money? You can in the pages of a book.
Fiction entertains us. It lets us escape from the humdrum. It lets us experience vicariously what we can’t experience in reality.
Being an avid reader and accumulator of books, I can look back and see how my interests have changed over the course of my life.
At one time dinosaurs were my passion. Then sailing ships. After that airships. I can see when my interests waxed, waned, and circled back to wax again. My science fiction and fantasy books date from when I was young. My mysteries from the 1980s. Horror, in all its various forms, goes back to my childhood, with a big upswing occurring in the 70s.
As of right now I mostly read mysteries, followed by horror. There is the occasional post-apocalyptic novel. Or space opera, or adventure story, or sea yarn. But when push comes to shove, I find myself reaching for that private eye novel, or that ghost story.
These are the stories that entertain me the most. They are the stories that provide me with a different and more exciting life.
And ten years from now? Who knows? I do know, so one thing. I’ll be reading something I find entertaining.
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
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