What I Think Fiction Is For

I finished The Hartleys by John Cheever on a plane to Salt Lake City a long time ago and had to reread the ending because I couldn’t believe what I thought I’d read.

I sat with it for a long time.

Then I read it again because I felt what I hadn’t felt before from a piece of fiction, it was a speechlessness, absolutely. The story had shown me a truth about people that nothing I’d read before had quite managed. I became desperate to recreate that feeling for my future readers.

I was desperate to do that because the story rewired what I thought fiction was capable of. I don’t mean what it was allowed to do, I mean exactly that, what it was capable of.

I know why people enter into fiction. Most of them are looking for relief. The world is difficult and stressful and relentless and a story offers a space where things are ordered differently and where people behave better than they do in life and where consequences are proportionate to a person’s actions and decisions, and where love is sustainable and change is possible and the ending arrives with justice or at least resolution.

I understand that. I don’t think it’s wrong.

It’s just not why I enter into a story.

I enter into a story because I want to see the world reflected. The broken people and the self-destructive people and the people who cannot help but make their lives worse despite their best intentions and their best efforts and their genuine desire to be different than they are.

I’m interested in fiction that gives me an honest view of them.

It makes a person feel seen. Validated. Less alone in what they have witnessed and survived and participated in. There is a relief that comes from having it named accurately, when you read something and think yes, that is what it is actually like, someone else saw it too, someone else thought it was worth writing down.

I have heard writers say they find it difficult to write a naive character. That they become uncomfortable inhabiting someone who believes something the writer finds credulous or foolish or easy to see through.

That tells me more about their range as a writer than anything else they could say.

The inability to inhabit a naive person without interfering or nudging them toward a less naive conclusion, without leaving small signs that underneath everything they already know better, that is a form of judgment. It is the writer’s own discomfort.

The writers whose work I find most compelling allow their characters to operate entirely under their own logic. The writer never course-corrects for their own comfort or for the market’s comfort. The characters are allowed to be exactly who they are and to do exactly what that makes them do and the story follows that wherever it goes without apology.

That is what The Hartleys did.

The characters operated honestly to who they were. The result was a story that felt more true.

There is a subset of readers who are loud and passionate in their hatred for this kind of fiction. Who actively advocate against stories that don’t idealize. They encounter a morally reprehensible character or a person who doesn’t make good choices or a person who doesn’t change or an ending that doesn’t resolve cleanly and experience it as a personal affront.

I’ve thought about what they’re protecting.

My best guess is a version of the world that doesn’t intersect with how ugly the world can actually be and how often it can be that. I don’t think these readers lack the capacity for empathy. But I think the fiction they’re defending against asks something of them that they’re not willing to give, which is a sustained, uncomfortable encounter with a version of human behavior that doesn’t confirm what they prefer to believe about people.

I simply choose not to look away from that. They prefer to. I don’t think either of us is wrong exactly.

But I know which kind of writer I am.

And.

I didn’t arrive here immediately.

When I started writing I wanted to write the same things everyone else was writing. Stories that don’t have much to say under the hood. Stories that exist for taking a reader from A to B without anything uncomfortable to consider, no larger question to be answered, just tight and formulaic stories that entertain and nothing more. I wrote a lot of that. I couldn’t finish most of it. I became bored of my own work, not bored of writing but bored of what I was writing toward.

There wasn’t a single project that turned me away. It was an accumulation of dissatisfaction with work I didn’t believe in and work I couldn’t finish because I didn’t care enough about what it was trying to do. At some point I started chasing something more that is harder and more honest.

What I found on the other side of that pivot was that the writing became more enjoyable, not less.

I am deeply in love with everything I create now. Even the work that is disliked by the people who enter it expecting something other than what I gave them.

Maybe especially that work.

I don’t think fiction’s job is to make us forgive the people it depicts. It shouldn’t be arguing for forgiveness at all. What a reader can or cannot forgive is their own business and the story that tries to manufacture that forgiveness is producing a different and lesser experience than the story that leaves it entirely up to the reader, in my own opinion.

The writer’s job is to present the character’s actions and perhaps their motivations with honesty and precision. The rest belongs to the reader. Anything beyond that leans toward excusal and preaching and I’m not interested in either.

I also don’t think every character needs to be understandable in the way that word usually gets thrown around. It usually sounds like relatable. Empathizable. Someone the reader can see themselves in.

You can be compelled by a character without agreeing with a single decision they make. Consistency is what produces that compulsion more than anything else, I think, a character whose behavior makes complete sense given what they believe, even when what they believe is something the reader would never believe. That coherence is what makes a character feel true.

I am fascinated by the character who doesn’t change.

I don’t think change is impossible.

But I do think lasting change, which is the sort of change people idealize and strive for, I think it is so rare that some people might go their entire lives without witnessing it. I think without daily, hourly diligence a return to who we are is inevitable. I think most people are not capable of that diligence indefinitely. They tire of the effort. They tire of the daily work that real change actually requires.

I’ve seen this in my life and childhood with love, too.

Love requires a person to deny impulses they cannot fully control.

To choose, again and again, against the grain of something that feels natural. Anger. Jealousy. Lust. It is very easy to give in to those impulses even in small ways. Even in ways that seem harmless. People tire of what love requires and descend, naturally, into the human behaviors that don’t agree with what love needs from them. The sustained effort of loving well and fully is, I believe, one of the hardest things a person can do and most of us are only intermittently capable of it.

That is not a cynical observation.

At least I don’t think so. I’m happy to be wrong.

But it is what I have witnessed. In my family. In the people around me.

In myself.

Fiction that pretends otherwise, that delivers the change that sustains the love, that rewards the effort with the outcome the effort deserves, I wouldn’t say it’s lying, not exactly. But it is leaving something out. Something true and worth depicting.

As a writer, I am just not interested in leaving it out.

I don’t know that I have a definitive philosophy of fiction. I have a set of convictions that have hardened over years of writing, the work that those convictions produced, and the deep satisfaction of loving what I make even when other people don’t.

What I believe, though, most fundamentally, is this:

Fiction is interesting to me because it allows us to understand and understand behavior we might otherwise condemn. That understanding, accumulated across enough books and enough characters and enough honest depictions of what people actually do when they are under pressure or in love or afraid or running out of options, that accumulation does something important to a person’s capacity for empathy and patience that I think the world desperately needs more of.

I’m not claiming fiction fixes any of those things.

Could you imagine???!!!

But I think it teaches you to look at a person and ask what they believe before you ask what they deserve.

That, I think, is worth spending a career on.