I am a particularly exasperating person to be around.

My friends can assure you of the truth of that fact. I don’t know, actually, why they put up with me. I’m never noticing what’s going on around me, because whatever is happening inside my head is almost always more interesting to me that what is around me. I’m not particularly proud of that, but it is part of the reason I’m good at what I do.

What I do is make up stories. Stories that feel real to me, with characters I know better than I know most of the aforementioned friends.

I’m not alone in that. “All good books,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, “are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

Yes: I live in my head. Wherever my current story ideas take me. To Cuba or Nepal or California. With people who sing, or tend cows, or—sometimes—commit murder. And those places and those people are real. They may not even make it out of my head, but for the time they’re there? They are real.

And I’m grateful when I do get around to writing these stories out to find that the people and situations I’ve created can become real for my readers as well. My friend Pat is a tour guide in Provincetown, where one of my mystery series is set. One day she was driving the trolley past a place I’d used in one of my novels as a backdrop for a particular scene, and she caught herself starting to tell the tourists about it. Oh, right, that didn’t really happen.

The truth of a good story with interesting characters may not be the same as the truth of mathematics or social history, but it is no less a truth. And I’d argue that these truths are as necessary to our development as thinking, feeling, full human beings as any other endeavor.

I often write about how reading stories develops empathy, a quality in high demand and apparently low presence in the world today. And yeah, not many people decide that they need to be more empathetic—to want it, you must already have at least an inkling of why it would be a good thing to have.

Empathy isn’t just about moving away from the “othering” of people and groups, as I often argue. There are some extremely practical reasons to desire empathy. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Christine Seifert suggests that what I call empathy and what she calls Emotional Quotient can actually be useful in the real world.

In a 2013 study, researchers examined something called the need for cognitive closure, or the desire to “reach a quick conclusion in decision-making and an aversion to ambiguity and confusion.” Individuals with a strong need for cognitive closure rely heavily on “early information cues,” meaning they struggle to change their minds as new information becomes available. They also produce fewer individual hypotheses about alternative explanations, which makes them more confident in their own initial (and potentially flawed) beliefs.
A high need for cognitive closure also means individuals gravitate toward smaller bits of information and fewer viewpoints. Individuals who resist the need for cognitive closure tend to be more thoughtful, more creative, and more comfortable with competing narratives—all characteristics of high EQ.
As readers, we’ll almost certainly find Lolita’s narrator Humbert Humbert odious, but we are forced to experience how he thinks, a valuable exercise for decreasing our need for cognitive closure. Furthermore, the researchers point out that when we are talking about someone else’s actions, we don’t feel compelled to defend ourselves. We can have conversations that might not happen in any other context, at least not with the same level of honesty.

Fiction touches us in ways that are different from the ways great visual art or music touches us. Oddly enough, I’d suggest that stories are more personal than either music or art, because we places ourselves into the people whose minds we’re reading about. We’ve been making up stories to explain, understand, even escape our worlds since we were living in caves and first discovering fire (invented no doubt so we could sit around it and tell still more stories!). When we read fiction, our brains activate the same regions that respond to real events, which is why we can find ourselves sad, frightened, transported by words.

“Literature,” wrote G.K. Chesterton, “is a luxury. Fiction is a necessity.” Storytellers—more than politicians or CEOs or explorers—hold the future in their hands, and readers take those stories out into their lives and make them real.

And making them real? That will change the world.

Why Stories?

What’s in a Name?