 The first question to ask about fiction is: Why

bother to read it?

 Unless fiction gives us something more than
pleasure, it’s hard to justify it as a subject for
study.
 To have a claim on our attention, it must
provide pleasure and understanding.
 “The truest history is full of falsehoods, and
your romance is full of truths” (Diderot to
Richardson). Most fiction is not, so we
classify all fiction in two categories.
 Escape Fiction: written purely for
entertainment – to help us pass time
agreeably.
 Interpretive Fiction: written to broaden and
deepen and sharpen our awareness of life.
 Interpretive fiction takes us, through the
imagination, deeper into the real world. It
enables us to understand our troubles.
 Escape fiction provides only pleasure.
 Interpretive fiction provides pleasure and
understanding.
 Escape and interpretation are not two
separate categories – they are the ends of a
spectrum.
 How do we decide how interpretive a story is?
 It’s not the presence or absence of a moral
 It’s not the presence or absence of facts
 It’s not the presence or absence of fantasy
 A story becomes interpretive as it
illuminates some aspect of human
behaviour.
 An interpretive story presents us with an insight
– large or small – into the nature and condition
of our existence.
 It helps us understand a universe that is
sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile.
 It helps us to understand our neighbors and
ourselves.
 The escape author is like an inventor who
creates an invention for our diversion. When we
push a button, lights flash and bells ring.
 The interpretive author is a discoverer who takes
us into the midst of life and says “Look, here is
the world!”
 The escape writer is full of tricks and surprises,
pulling rabbits out of hats or flowers out of a
sleeve.
 The interpretive writer takes us behind the
scenes and shows us how the illusions work.
 This is not to say the interpretive writer is the
same as a reporter: the interpretive writer
also uses tricks and illusions, but always with
the intent of helping us see the world more
clearly.
 We all begin with fairy tales: many of us never grow
beyond them - a movement backward as we lose
the sense of wonder from childhood.
 Makes fixed demands of every story, and is
disappointed if they're not met.
 Sticks to one genre: sports, western, crime
drama…
 Looks for a formula:
 A sympathetic (likeable) hero who the reader can
pretend to be
 A plot that is always exciting
 A happy ending that does not question or disturb
 A theme which confirms the reader’s world view.
 Enjoys fiction that deals with life significantly
rather than formulas of escape.
 Knows that reading only escape has two
dangers:
 It may leave us with superficial attitudes toward
life
 It may distort our view of reality and give us false
expectations about life
 The individual reader’s preferences and
emotions often exert a powerful influence on
how we read and what we read.
 Previous experience in life and in fiction
inform our ability to grasp a story’s meaning,
as well as our response to allusions, structure,
technique and style.
 A perceptive reader must be able to discuss a
story’s strengths as well as, even in spite of,
our response to it.
 We have a finite amount of time to read, but
the book options are nearly endless. We need
to know two things:
 How to get the most out of what we read
 How to choose the books that will best repay the
time it takes to read them.